Highlights from the Carpentries Community Calendar
Carpentries Now Across All Seven Continents
Harriet Alexander, a postdoctoral fellow in oceanography bioinformatics at the University of California, Davis, travelled to McMurdo Station in Antarctica for the Antarctic Biology Training Program. She hosted a Software Carpentry workshop while she was there, the first ever Carpentries workshop in Antarctica. Read more.
Data Carpentry Geospatial Lesson Release
The long-awaited Data Carpentry curriculum for working with Geospatial data is now ready to teach! As all newly developed curricula are ‘beta’, we are actively promoting workshops and will collect feedback afterwards to improve these lessons. We will also be onboarding Instructors who want to teach these new lessons. Sign up for onboarding or read more.
Bilingual Instructor Training in Spanish and English
Rayna Harris reports on the first-ever bilingual Instructor training recently run for people across six Latin American countries. The training was conducted in Spanish and English by Rayna, Greg Wilson, Sue McClatchy, Paula Andrea Martinez and Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran. Read about the long and winding road that resulted in this great milestone which will extend the Carpentries’ reach in Latin America.
ELIXIR - Milestone Partnership Agreement Reached
ELIXIR and The Carpentries initiative are extending their collaboration to organise and deliver training to ELIXIR’s many Nodes. ELIXIR announced this in a press release last week. As part of the collaboration, The Carpentries will organise close to 20 Software and Data Carpentry training workshops across ELIXIR Nodes, and two Instructor Training workshops to train a number of specialised instructors. Bioinformatics training to help life-science researchers work effectively with ELIXIR resources is a key priority. Read more.
Community News
Request for Comment - Bylaws for The Carpentries
The Carpentries' Executive Council has announced a Request for Comment on bylaws for The Carpentries. Bylaws traditionally describe the rules and regulations used to run an organisation, and will cover things such as governance, membership, and lesson programs. Kate Hertweck explains the process for commenting on the EC’s proposed bylaws in this blog post. Have your say on what has been proposed by midnight on 14 September.
Our Mission and Vision - Have Your Say
To get feedback on both the draft Mission and the draft Vision for the merged Carpentries, the Carpentries’ Executive Council has issued a Request for Comment. Read the background to the call in this blog post or comment directly on either the Vision Statement or the Mission Statement or both. Lots of people have already weighed in. Comments are open until 31 August.
Mentor Onboarding
Interested in leading a Carpentries Mentoring Group? Kari Jordan will host a Mentor Onboarding on 6-September to train mentors and go over goal setting. Sign-up to attend the mentor onboarding at either 11:00 UTC or 23:00 UTC. If you haven’t filled out the form to be a mentor yet, click here. Those wishing to join a mentoring group as a mentee can sign-up here.
Getting the Message
We have been tweeting for some time as The Carpentries, yet many of our Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry Twitter followers have not yet followed us at our new Twitter account. Follow us today to stay on top of community news and announcements.
Report from the first URSSI workshop
The US NSF’s SI2 program has funded the planning for a US Research Software Institute (URSSI).
Karthik Ram,
Dan Katz, and others have now written up a report of the first workshop held on 10-12 April 2018 at the University of California, Berkeley. A diverse group of 68 participants from 48 institutions spanning universities, national labs, and private industry attended. Key issues raised were training and workforce development, including the sustainability of research software engineers (RSEs) as the human infrastructure of scientific software.
Read the full report.
Libraries and The Carpentries - Natural Partners
Elaine L. Westbrooks, University Librarian, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has written about the strategic value of Library Carpentry and The Carpentries to research libraries. She describes how libraries are partnering with The Carpentries to sustain training with the help of data-savvy librarians and innovative spaces. Librarians hoping their institutions will partner with The Carpentries will find this useful.
Read more.
Committee and Task Force Activity
Plus ça change ...
The Mentoring Committee has had a name change - it will now be known as the Instructor Development Committee. The change will be made across mailing lists, websites, and GitHub repos in the weeks to come. Co-Chair Toby Hodges
explains why it was important to rename it, but also stresses that nothing but the name is changing. Committee members will still focus on the core business of helping Instructors develop confidence and skills.
What you may have missed on the blog or mailing lists
A lively discussion has been running on Discuss about Jupyter Notebooks, the catalyst being the posting of Joel Grus’s talk at JupyterCon which, given the venue, was somewhat surprisingly called I Don’t Like Notebooks.
Another popular Discuss thread has been the outpouring of info and links on materials for data management training.
Tweet of the Week
See Jonah’s slides from this talk.
Joinery
Report from JupyterCon
It was great to see education and democratizing access as key themes for this year’s JupyterCon! There was a full education track. Talks included Lorena Barba and Robert Talbert’s Best practices for using Jupyter in flipped classrooms, 'Canadians land on Jupyter' about deployment of JupyterHubs across universities in Canada, and Carpentries Executive Council member Elizabeth Wickes’s fantastic talk on Reproducible education: what teaching can learn from open science practices. Making open educational materials more like open source for sharing, collaboration and co-development was a consistent theme in talks - it’s great to realize The Carpentries are already doing this!
Carol Willing’s keynote Sustaining Wonder: Jupyter and the knowledge commons highlighted the ‘joy in discovery’, while Carpentries’ ED Tracy Teal’s keynote 'Democratizing Data' identified training and investing in people as crucial to empowering people to ask important questions that address diverse issues in science and society. Along with some challenges discussed by Joel Grus (see above), there remains a lot of potential for using Jupyter, JupyterHub and MyBinder in educational settings.
Offcuts
The Top Ten
Greg Wilson is preparing some talks based on Teaching Tech Together, and has drafted Ten Simple Rules for Creating an Effective Lesson as part of that process. Is something missing? Greg is looking for feedback, so have a look at the list and let him know what you think. Contact details are in the post.
Toolshed (Posts from our Past)
In September, 2017, Lactatia Motsuku, Glenn Moncrieff, Margereth Gfrerer and Anelda van der Walt posted about the first-ever Data Carpentry workshop in Ethiopia. There have now been more than TEN Carpentries workshops in that country. From little things, big things grow ...
Papers & manuscripts from and for the community
