Highlights from the Carpentries Community Calendar
CarpentryCon 2018
We are less than a month away from CarpentryCon 2018 in Dublin! The Task Force has compiled two great resources: The A-Z of CarpentryCon to answer a whole range of questions, and a logistics etherpad where people can share information, volunteer their time, and ask questions. Standard registration closes at midnight on 11 May - after that time, the price goes up $50, so book early to save. Follow the special CarpentryCon twitter feed for news and updates.
A Big Thank You to Bug BBQ Contributors
If you participated in the recent Bug BBQ, thank you for helping make Carpentries lessons even better! There was a lot of action in several lesson repositories during the event, not just the Social Science and Geospatial lessons, with 74 unique contributors submitting issues or pull requests. François Michonneau sums it all up in this blog post.
Extended Data Carpentry Workshop
Have you ever considered running a workshop over a number of weeks rather than compressing it all into two days? Justin Millar, Shawn Taylor, Ben Kok Toh, and Ethan White have written a post about the pros and cons of running a Data Carpentry Ecology workshop at the University of Florida over seven weeks instead of two days. One plus? “The workshop series ... provided a less time- and material-intensive opportunity for newly trained instructors to gain some teaching experience.”
Read more.
Community News
New Curriculum Advisory Committee (CAC) for Software Carpentry Lessons
We now have Curriculum Advisors for the Software Carpentry lesson stack. Please join us in welcoming Jonah Duckles (@jduckles), Marianna Foos (@MariannaFoos), Brittany Lasseigne (@bnlasse), Madicken Munk (@munkium), Byron J. Smith (@ByronJSmith), and David Yakobovitch (@davidyako) as the CAC for Software Carpentry lessons. Curriculum Advisors help to provide strategic oversight, vision, and leadership to to guide the development of lessons.
Carpentries Presence at 1st CoNECD Conference
Kari L. Jordan, the Carpentries Director of Assessment and Community Equity, attended the 1st CoNECD (Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity) Conference in Arlington, VA, USA, 29 April - 2 May. The CoNECD (pronounced “connected”) Conference provided a forum for exploring current research and practices to enhance diversity and inclusion of all under-represented populations in engineering and computing professions, including gender identity and expression, race and ethnicity, disability, veterans, LGBTQ+, 1st generation and socio-economic status.
Kari facilitated a workshop with Virginia Booth-Womack, National President & Executive Director of NAMEPA using Google Data Studio and ASEE’s degrees awarded dataset. The goal of the workshop was for minority engineering program (MEP) directors to leave with the skills needed to make the business case for diversity programs at their institution. Other highlights from the conference included dialogue around what are the core values organizations should embody, how to recruit and train inclusive champions, and critiquing the “under-represented minority” label.
New Website and Handbook
Carpentries staff have been busy with the
release of the new
Carpentries Website and the
launch of our all-new
Carpentries Handbook. Both have been enthusiastically received by our community. We are blogging more frequently as
The Carpentries so please visit the new
blog. Please follow us on Twitter (
@thecarpentries) as we will more frequently tweet through there than through the individual Software or Data Carpentry Twitter accounts.
Library Carpentry News
Chris Erdmann recently accepted the role of Library Carpentry Community and Development Director. The role, funded by a two-year IMLS grant, is based at California Digital Library, and Chris will be working closely with The Carpentries. Chris will be leading the northern hemisphere activity for the two-day Library Carpentry Sprint on 10-11 May. So far, 10 sites are on board. Belinda Weaver will lead activity in the southern hemisphere. Anyone wanting to take part can sign up on this etherpad. Sites need to be registered with Mozilla.
