Carpentry Clippings, 10 October, 2018
Highlights from The Carpentries Community Calendar
Nominate a Community Member
Our volunteer community has many unsung heros - people who work hard for the Carpentries in their local communities. Now is your chance to record your appreciation by nominating one (or more!) of those people for our annual Community Service Awards. These awards are managed by the Carpentries’ Executive Council who will receive the nominations and decide on a winner. Nominations close on 19 November. Read more.
Next Stop, Social Science
We started our first round of lesson-specific Instructor onboarding in September to prepare Instructors to teach the newly released Data Carpentry Geospatial curriculum. We are now offering five one-hour onboarding sessions in October for our Social Science lessons. Sign up on this pad. A recorded onboarding will be made available after 9 November for Instructors unable to join a live session.
Community News
Work with the Carpentries!
We currently have two job openings, for a Community Engagement Lead and for an Administrative Support Specialist. Join our team and support The Carpentries' mission full-time! Both positions are open to anyone, anywhere, who has the right qualifications for the roles. Read more in our blog post.
Information for Instructors
We have added a new section to the Carpentries Handbook for current and aspiring Instructors. Check it out and let us know if it has all the information you want. If there is anything missing, raise an issue on the Handbook’s GitHub repository.
Onboarding Video for Geospatial Lessons
If you were unable to attend the Geospatial onboarding sessions last month, but still want to teach the material, we have posted an onboarding video to our YouTube channel. Instructors who complete onboarding will have priority status for teaching opportunities with this curriculum. Email Erin Becker if you have any questions.
Survey about Research Software
The NSF-Funded US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) conceptualization project is seeking input on how to increase the amount of sustainable research software available, and how to increase and improve the research that relies on that software. To do that, they have created a survey for the US research software community. The survey should take 10-15 minutes to complete. Information gathered will help plan a potential institute to carry out some of the activities in response to reported needs. Take the survey.
Finding the Path
Belinda Weaver kicked off what we hope will be a new blog post series by laying out how she got involved in the Carpentries. With so many different roles to play - Instructor, Trainer, Maintainer, mentor, helper, workshop host - people join our community for many different reasons and through many different pathways. Help others see that they belong in the Carpentries by sharing your pathway story through this form. We will post the submissions on our blog.
4 Open Source Software Issue Bonanza
Some of our instructors with SoftDev best practices, ELIXIR-Training, and the Tools platform are organising an issue bonanza to improve the 4 Open Source Software recommendations (4OSS) lesson content on 10-12th of October to help identify issues that need fixing before publication. You don't need to be an expert in the materials - we need people to help search for broken links and typos too! Read more here.
Committee and Task Force News
CarpentryCon Call for Volunteers
The CarpentryCon Task Force welcomed community members to their most recent call, where they answered questions on what volunteering to build CarpentryCon 2020 will entail. There is now a form for people to volunteer for the Task Force, or to offer more general help. The meeting also discussed
CarpentryConnect events. See the meeting notes.
Instructor Trainers
At our recent meeting Trainers discussed priorities for a push on Instructor Training Curriculum maintenance in October. Discussion also addressed 'unofficial' instructor training workshops using some or all content to spread pedagogical literacy in non-Carpentry contexts. See the meeting notes.
Genomics Curriculum Advisory Committee
The Genomics CAC discussed updating the Data Carpentry Genomics lessons to use a more modern, longer-read dataset and a more modern aligner. The CAC will work with community members to implement these changes before the next release. The R lessons will also be added to the Genomics workshop in early 2019. See the meeting notes.
What you may have missed on the blog and mailing lists
Lex Nederbragt has kicked off a busy thread about how to scale up Carpentries training at universities. Sarah Brown’s post about %load magic for presenting exercises also got a lot of people talking. Take the survey in the post about whether you want to pair Jupyter and other IDEs to cut down time for compute-heavy coding.
Tweet of the Week
Papers and manuscripts for and from the community
Community Job postings
Joinery
Kari Jordan attended the 8th annual ADBC Summit, 1-3 October, 2018, in Gainesville, Florida (USA). The Summit brings together representatives from TCNs, PENs, NSF, iDigBio, and other initiatives related to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program.
Tracy Teal and Camille Avestruz are teaching Software and Data Carpentry on 10 October, 2018, at a pre-conference workshop for the 2018 SACNAS National Diversity in STEM Conference in San Antonio, Texas (USA). The SACNAS conference "consistently provides a unique intersection of cutting-edge science, familia, motivation, and opportunity for students and scientists at all levels."
Toolshed (Posts from our Past)
The Helper Pathway
More than a year ago, the Software Carpentry blog featured this post called Why be a helper at Software Carpentry workshops? Given that we have just kicked off a series on people’s pathways to involvement, this seemed a timely post to revisit as many in our community start out as workshop helpers. Share your pathway story.
Other places to connect
Have something you’d like to have included? Send it to newsletter@carpentries.org.
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