Highlights from the Carpentries Community Calendar
Community Calls for Libraries
Libraries have traditionally been great supporters of The Carpentries, with many the catalyst for Carpentries membership in their universities. As part of Library Carpentry community building, Chris Erdmann has lined up a series of community calls to discuss topics of relevance to library upskilling, and to share community news. Upcoming calls will feature guest speakers, the first being Shelley Stall, Director of Data Programs at the American Geophysical Union, on 6 August at 20:00 UTC. Shelley will give an update on Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data and software and how librarians can get involved. Later topics include Binder. Read more.
Growing the RSE community in Australia and New Zealand
To help win recognition for researchers who code, the Victorian Research Software Engineers community are hosting a community meeting on Tuesday, 14 August 2018, 3 pm-5 pm AEST at the University of Melbourne.
Tickets (free) available. There is a
Google Group for Australian and New Zealand RSEs and supporters to join.
Community News
LatAm Experience of CarpentryCon
Not to be outdone by the African Carpentry Task Force's positive post, several members of the Carpentries in Latin America have now compiled their own reflections about CarpentryCon 2018, complete with word cloud (‘Share’ was the most frequently used word, followed by ‘thank' and ‘friend’). Read more.
Workshop Fees Begone!
To align Software and Data Carpentry self-organized workshop fees post-merger, the 2018 Carpentries Executive Council recently passed a motion to eliminate the $500 fee charged to organizations for hosting self-organized Data Carpentry workshops. With luck, this will foster more workshops in places that lack the resources to pay fees. Read more.
Using R in the Curriculum
Curriculum Development Lead François Michonneau recently attended and presented at the useR! 2018 event in Brisbane. His talk was called Lessons learned from developing R-based curricula across disciplines and you can watch it here. Other presentations from useR!2018 are available.
Update Your Instructor Profile
Instructors, have you updated your AMY profile recently? Be sure to get it up-to-date so you can be listed on our new instructor page to be launched soon. No more emailing us photos and bios - a data feed from AMY will keep your information current. Profile information you include, for example, a Twitter handle, GitHub ID, ORCiD, or personal website URL will all be linked on this new, data-driven page. The image displayed will be from GitHub. Because of privacy law, only those instructors who opt in will be listed.
Evidence of Carpentries' Impact on Learners
Many community members who want to justify involvement with The Carpentries would like evidence that our workshops have an impact. We've had some exciting results from our surveys and want to make you aware of the impact our workshops have on learners. Read more.
One Day, Three Carpentries
Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry and Library Carpentry were taught simultaneously at the recent ResBaz 
event in Dunedin, New Zealand. The Data Carpentry workshop was based on the genomics curriculum, while Software Carpentry was a Python-based workshop. For Library Carpentry, librarians from the University of Otago and Dunedin public libraries, and staff from the Otago museum crowded in to learn the shell, OpenRefine, and regular expressions from Belinda Weaver and Jonah Duckles. The workshops came before a great day of talks. Read more.
Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry moving to a common survey
We are constantly looking to improve our assessment strategy, from trying out skills-based questions (see here and here) to streamlining questions to ensure we are gathering the right data to help us improve our workshops. Accordingly, in the coming weeks, we will be moving to one common pre- and post-workshop survey for both Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry. This survey is largely based on the current Data Carpentry pre and post survey. We are investigating using Typeform (instead of SurveyMonkey), as Typeform integrates well with the other tools we use. Thank you for your continued support for our assessment efforts.
Executive Council News
Mission, Vision and Bylaws
The Executive Council has recently been working on revising and solidifying the mission, vision, and bylaws for The Carpentries. (Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry each had separate wordings for these, so we need new wordings for the merged organisation.) To solicit input about the direction the Council are taking, the Council will shortly post a call asking for community views on the proposed mission and vision, and another call soon after that on their proposed new bylaws. These requests will take the form of Requests for Comment (
RFCs).
Read more.
Subcommittee Activity
Discussion Session Hosts
We have a few new session hosts after the excellent onboarding sessions Kari Jordan and Toby Hodges ran for new discussion hosts on 2/3 July. Hosts who want to sign up to run sessions can do so on the etherpad. Join the email channel on TopicBox to stay in touch.
What you may have missed on the blog or mailing lists
Getting self organized workshops off the ground has been a hot topic on the Discuss list. Not on Discuss? It’s a great list to keep an eye on, especially if you have questions to ask. You can join and manage all your Carpentries list memberships at carpentries.topicbox.com.
Tweet of the Week
Joinery
Offcuts
Carpentries Executive Director Tracy Teal was very busy at this year’s SciPy in Austin. She gave a keynote address on ‘Democratizing Data’, and also ran two Birds of a Feather sessions: ‘How to give a lightning talk’, and ‘Data and Computing Education’, the latter with Hugo Bowne-Anderson of DataCamp.
Papers & manuscripts from and for the community
