Highlights from the Carpentries Community Calendar
Be a Champ
The next Carpentry Champions call will take place on 18 September at 20:00 UTC. Carpentry Champions are people who want to build strong local communities. Some local champions have already contributed to our Community Cookbook. In this quarterly call, we will discuss ways in which community members are already supporting learners post-workshop, and have a community conversation about how we can all help each other better support our learners. Sign up on the etherpad, where you will also find connection details. See the date and time in your zone.
CarpentryCon 2020 - Volunteer Organisers and Helpers Welcome
The next CarpentryCon Task Force call is an open call where potential volunteers to help organise CarpentryCon 2020 can meet the existing Task Force members, hear more about what’s involved in creating a CarpentryCon event, and ask questions. The call will take place on 25 September at 20:00 UTC. Check the time and date in your zone. Sign up on the etherpad or read more.
Community News
Updates to our Code of Conduct
Since its inception, The Carpentries community has subscribed to a Code of Conduct (CoC). Our CoC is a crucial part of making our community more inclusive and diverse. However, incidents in 2016 highlighted issues with enforcement and adjudicating reported violations. Accordingly, the Policy Committee (now rebadged as the Code of Conduct Committee) began the review that has resulted in this update. Read more.
CarpentryConnect Johannesburg
More than 40 people completed Carpentries instructor training with Caroline F. Ajilogba, Anelda van der Walt, Allegra Via, and Sarah M. Brown (pictured) at the recent CarpentryConnect Johannesburg. Check out the hashtag #CarpentryConnectJHB for tweets, photos, and other highlights from the event. CarpentryConnects are regional events, based on the global CarpentryCon model. A full report on CarpentryConnect Johannesburg will be posted on the Carpentries blog soon.
New Trainers
A new round of Trainers-in-training has opened, with twenty people from a wide range of countries taking part. Trainers-to-be come from Argentina, Australia, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the USA, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. The training will be led virtually by Karen Word. Read more.
Our Data
Data Carpentry datasets and data used in Stencila training are among the many open data sources now findable through Google’s recently launched Open Dataset search.
Research Software Survey
If you write software for research, consider filling in the survey that the Software Sustainability Institute is currently running. The survey is open to Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and others who identify with that role. If you know someone who should be filling it in, please pass the link on.
Library Carpentry Expands its Trainer Pool
The Library Carpentry community in the US and Canada has had a real boost after Karen Word, Juliane Schneider, and Chris Erdmann went to the University of Calgary to run instructor training and a Library Carpentry workshop. Thirty-five people attended the LC workshop, while 22 took the instructor training workshop. The University of Calgary Libraries were already looking to support researchers on campus as well as improve and automate their workflows, so Library Carpentry’s core objectives and curriculum seemed a perfect fit for their staff. Read more.
Carpentries Style Guide
To provide a standard reference point when questions arise about style for The Carpentries, we have begun a Style Guide.This is currently a Google Doc but it will be migrated to a GitHub repo once it is ready. Comments are welcome, as we are keen to make the guide something of use to our community. Go to the Guide.
Atmospheric and Ocean Science Lessons
Damien Irving, a long term Carpentries supporter, has released lessons for researchers working with weather, ocean, and climate data. The lesson is in early development and people to teach it are being sought. Read more.
Committee and Task Force Activity
CarpentryCon 2020 - Call for Volunteers
Three months on, the Carpentry Con Task Force has posted a summary and series of reflections on CarpentryCon 2018. The post also issues a call to action for people who want to volunteer to help build the next CarpentryCon which will take place in 2020. All kinds of help would be welcome. The post also links to videos of the keynote speakers: Valeria Aurora, Greg Wilson, Desmond Higgins and Anelda van der Walt, with the African Carpentries Task Force. Read more.
African Carpentries Task Force Update
On 18 July, Erika Mias presented on behalf of the African Carpentries Task Force at the e/Merge 2018 Festival of e-Learning in Africa. Erika’s talk was entitled ‘Pioneering online lesson supplement for Carpentries instructor training: Increasing Instructor Participation and Certification Numbers in Africa’. The talk discussed the ACTF’s pilot of a new program for onboarding Carpentry Instructors to teach by running mini-workshops online for Instructors.
Mentoring Onboarding
Two successful onboarding sessions were run last week to induct both mentors and mentees into the next round. There was a good showing from Africa, as the recent CarpentryConnect event in Johannesburg sparked a lot of interest in our mentoring program. If you want to know what is happening when, check out the schedule.
First Instructor Development Committee Meeting
The Instructor Development Committee (formerly the Mentoring Subcommittee) will have its first meeting under the new name on 17 September at 13:00 UTC and 23:00 UTC. Sign up to attend and get involved with new projects to develop our ever-growing Instructor pool.
What you may have missed on the blog or mailing lists
Carpentries Executive Council member Ethan White published a post on the structure of the Executive Council, the main leadership body for The Carpentries. In other EC news, a Request for Comment is still open for feedback on the proposed new bylaws for the Carpentries. This closes very soon, so be quick.
Brett Becker, Greg Wilson and others are conducting a study on what questions people who teach computing would most like researchers to answer. Participation is sought. Read more.
The launch of the Data Carpentry geospatial lessons caused excitement, while the thread on version control of datasets keeps growing and growing.
Tweet of the Week
Joinery
We now have 75 member organisations across a range of countries. Recent member organisations joining are based in the US, the UK, and Germany.
Toolshed (Posts from our Past)
In June 2017, Peter Steinbach posted about running an HPC workshop in a day. Things have moved on a lot with HPC Carpentry since then, with a breakout session at CarpentryCon 2018 and a half-day workshop there as well.
Papers & manuscripts from and for the community
