Highlights from the Carpentries Community Calendar
Keynote Address at GCC/BOSC
Carpentries Executive Director Tracy Teal delivered a keynote address, ‘Democratizing Data’ to BOSC in Portland on 27 June. Morgan Taschuk tweeted a great summary of the talk, which, among other topics, called for recognition for those who develop research software, and for making data and software skills more accessible to all. Jason Williams tweeted: Dynamic as always @tracykteal is making her presentation interactive! Everyone contributing to a live word cloud about what they enjoy in working in #Bioinformatics. Tracy tweeted in response: “Thanks so much for the opportunity, all the work of the @thecarpentries community & the audience who was willing to participate in some Think-Pair-Share.” See Tracy’s slides.
Training and Checkout Combo and CarpentryConnect Davis
SherAaron Hurt (we know her as Sher!) helped run instructor training as part of the recent CarpentryConnect Davis event. After the training, instructor trainees were able to attend workshops to see at first hand how workshops are conducted. Sher! co-hosted live demo and discussion sessions with Trainers Anelda van der Walt and Erin Becker so attendees could finish their checkout then and there. CarpentryConnect Davis, a regional Carpentries meetup, followed with community building from Anelda, working on some Binder with Carol Willing, JetStream/XSEDE with Titus Brown and some great 'unconference'-style breakouts. (There will be a full report of this event in the next newsletter).
Community News
Executive Council Meeting - A Summary
Mission and Vision for the Carpentries were at the top of the agenda for the recent two-day Executive Council meeting in Gainesville, Florida. A brainstorming session revealed “a shared passion around building communities that are inclusive, diverse, and accessible. There was also a general sense that building communities is as important for The Carpentries as teaching workshops.” Strategic planning and communication were also discussed at the meeting. The Council is ramping up its communication and communications strategy. Expect to see requests for community feedback, starting with the mission and vision in July. EC Chair Karen Cranston has written up a summary of the meeting where you can see the details.
Report for Executive Council
To brief the Executive Council about Carpentries activity since Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry merged (and even before), Carpentries staff put together a report on joint activity for the EC meeting. Two key milestones during that time were the creation and launch of both The Carpentries Handbook and the new Carpentries website. Erin Becker has written a blog post about this report, and you can read the report itself.
Thank You, CarpentryCon, from the African Carpentries Task Force
“What a wonderful workshop!” “I’m proud to be a member of this vibrant community and thank you for holding this conference in a fabulous venue and making me feel so welcome.” “I think this is how conferences should be organized.” Those are just a few of the comments about CarpentryCon 2018 from eight African Carpentries Task Force attendees. They have written a fantastic summary of what the experience was like for each of them. Read more. Photo credit: Bérénice Batut.
Memberships and The Carpentries
We now have more than 60 member organizations in 10 countries. Collectively these memberships generate 59% of Carpentries' revenue. Workshop fees bring in 19% of our annual revenue, while grants and donations account for 22% of revenue. Through these recurring annual membership fees, we have been able to secure a future where The Carpentries is a significant ally in the spread of skills and impactful digital skills teaching at many of the leading research institutions in the world. Read more.
Open Carpentries Instructor Training for Librarians
An open call has been issued for people in library roles to attend Carpentries instructor training on 30-31 August at the University of Calgary Libraries. The event will focus on preparing members of the library community as Carpentries instructors. The sessions will be led by Karen Word, Juliane Schneider, and Chris Erdmann. Read more.
Software Carpentry Curriculum Advisors’ First Meeting
Software Carpentry Curriculum Advisors will hold their first meeting in the second week of July. This group helps provides vision and leadership for Software Carpentry lessons. The agenda will be posted publicly one week before the meeting and meeting minutes will be made public through a GitHub repo.
Subcommittee Activity
Discussion Session Hosts Onboarding
The Mentoring Subcommittee held two special onboarding sessions for potential new discussion hosts on 2/3 July. These followed Toby Hodges’ recent call for new hosts. The onboarding sessions explained what hosting entailed, provided a forum for questions, and allowed people to have a go at running a session. Nine people attended the first session and there were ten at session two. If you missed the session, but still want to get involved, join us on TopicBox to see the notes.
CarpentryCon Debriefing
The CarpentryCon Task Force met on 15 June to debrief on what worked well at CarpentryCon 2018 and what needs to be improved for next time. A debriefing document has been created for the Task Force to fill in with their own observations, and this will be reviewed at the next Task Force meeting in July. Kari Jordan is also looking to write a post about the results from the daily session surveys and the post-conference survey once this analysis is complete. Stay tuned for reports.
What you may have missed on the blog or mailing lists
On Discuss, Pey Lian Lim raised the question of etiquette around open source projects, citing this video, Setting Expectations for Open Source Communication, a PyCon US lightning talk by Dr Brett Cannon, which addressed that issue.
Tweet of the Week
Tip of the Week
Using RStudio? ALT + Shift + K provides a quick reference to a number of keyboard shortcuts, for example, pressing the ALT and the hyphen (or dash) keys together (ALT + -) creates the assignment operator (<-).
Offcuts
Kari Jordan presented a paper to the Annual Conference & Exposition for the American Society for Engineering Education in Salt Lake City, UT. The paper, Short-format workshops build skills and confidence for researchers to work with data, was co-written by Kari, Marianne Corvellec, Elizabeth Wickes, Naupaka Zimmerman, Jonah Duckles, and Tracy Teal. Check out the slide deck.
SherAaron Hurt and Kari Jordan ran instructor training for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on 18-19 June. This partnership has been in the works for some time. Learners were very engaged, with several almost finishing their check out!
Jonah Duckles and Belinda Weaver are attending ResBaz Dunedin at the University of Otago. The event runs from 4-6 July. Jonah will be helping at many events and will leading discussions. Belinda will assist at Carpentries events and also teach a one-day Library Carpentry ‘Express’ workshop. The following week, she will run the ‘express’ workshop three times for the following NZ Universities: Canterbury, Massey, and Auckland, as part of a Library Carpentry roadshow funded by the Council of New Zealand University Librarians.
Library Carpentry Community and Development Director Chris Erdmann is also hitting the road. Chris will be visiting and discussing Library Carpentry at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France on 3 July, speaking at LIBER in Lille about Library Carpentry and data science in libraries (4-5 July), and then attending and helping with the FAIR Data & Software week-long workshop (9-13 July) organised by TIB Hannover.
Joinery
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Papers & manuscripts from and for the community
