Carpentry Clippings, 26 September 2017
Highlights from the Software and Data Carpentry Community Calendar
Community News
Nominate a Hard Worker
Is there a Software Carpentry community member you’ve noticed working extra hard to help our organization? If so, please nominate this person for a Community Service Award. The Award was inaugurated last year to recognize the crucial role of volunteer contributions to our work. The Software Carpentry Steering Committee will choose and announce awards in December. Read more.
New Staffers
At our recent in-person staff meeting in Davis, California, we ‘onboarded’ three new members of the Carpentries’ team - SherAaron Hurt, Elizabeth Williams and Karen Word. SherAaron will assist Maneesha Sane with workshop logistics. Elizabeth will assist Jonah Duckles with onboarding and supporting Member organizations and general business and financial operations, while Karen Word will work with Erin Becker on instructor training. All will be working with the Carpentries part-time.
Requests for Comment on The Carpentries
Do you have questions or concerns about the upcoming merger of Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry into The Carpentries? Are you curious about our plans? Please visit the merger GitHub repository to learn about our plan of action and offer comments (either as issues or via this Google Form) by October 6, 2017. Read more.
In-Person Staff Meeting
In addition to onboarding new staff at our meeting, we also discussed aligning our daily work with the mission and vision of the Carpentries, identifying the infrastructure and processes we need so we can continue to scale, and worked out next steps on instructor training, CarpentryCon, mentoring, and memberships. A fuller report on our in-person meeting can be found here.
Subcommittee Activity
Lesson Maintenance
There has been a lot of lesson discussion and activity lately, with the recent lesson infrastructure sub-committee meeting, a pair of community calls led by Christina Koch, and the launch of a new task force to develop the future Carpentries’ lesson organization. In the community calls, Christina led members of our community through discussions about current workflows, issues and pain points, and ways we might recognize and reward lesson maintainers. If you are interested in trying on a leadership role for the Carpentries or are simply interested in speaking up about future plans for the lessons, sign up for the lesson organization Task Force forming now.
Mentoring
Round two of the Carpentries’ Mentoring Program is about to be launched. This program links new instructors with more experienced members of our community. Support is provided to mentees through small, targeted groups. The inaugural pilot program was well received and now we are ready to go again. Kari Jordan will introduce the upcoming program and answer questions in an information session on 2 October at 22:00 UTC. See the local date and time for you. Sign up to attend on the etherpad.
Trainer Training
We will shortly be announcing another call for Instructors who would like to train as Trainers (the people who run instructor training). We recently welcomed a new cohort of Trainers, and are about to call for expressions of interest for another round. Training new instructors is a lot of fun and very rewarding, so stay tuned for the call and then help us spread the word.
Joinery
Jonah Duckles will be hosting another webinar on 10 October at noon UTC for people who might have questions about how their institutions can join Software and Data Carpentry. Check out our membership page, then bring your questions to the webinar. See your local time for the webinar. You can sign up on the webinars’ etherpad.
PyCon Florida
Kari L. Jordan will be speaking at Florida’s first PyCon Conference in Orlando, FL. Workshops will cover three primary tracks: web, data science, and speaker’s choice. Kari will be speaking about Data and Software Carpentry’s training impact surveys. If you’re interested in attending, discount codes are available. E-mail Kari for more information.
OpenCon Berlin - Any Carpenters going?
Invitations to OpenCon 11-13 November, 2017 in Berlin, were sent out last week. If you are going, and want to meet up with other Carpenters there, please add your details to our meetups page.
What you may have missed on the blog and mailing lists
There was a future of lesson maintenance thread on the Maintainers list, while accessibility issues were aired on the Discuss list with a thread about making programming resources accessible. An earlier thread by Joanna Leng about how we can make workshops better for people with dyslexia was posted on the Data Carpentry blog. Requests were posted for teaching biology via programming or vice versa and for resources on reproducibility for novices.
Offcuts
By the Numbers
During August, we badged 21 new Software Carpentry instructors and 16 new Data Carpentry instructors, making 37 in all - more than one person per day. We welcome all these new instructors to our community and look forward to teaching with them.
JupyterCon
Kari L. Jordan spoke about training as a way to onboard diverse populations to Python and Jupyter notebooks, and achieving equity in the Python community during the inaugural JupyterCon in New York City. You can download the slidedeck from this talk, and check out the Etherpad to join the conversation.
Webinar
Handiest Tool
As the work of the Carpentries diversifies and proliferates, so too does the number of etherpads. Stay on top of them all with the one-stop pad-of-pads.
Papers & manuscripts from the community
Other places to connect
If you can't get enough Software and Data Carpentry, here are some other places to connect with our community.
Have something you’d like to have included in our next newsletter? Please send items to newsletter@software-carpentry.org
|
