If you recently completed instructor training and are looking to attend a community discussion as part of your checkout process, we have several open slots in the Community Discussions Etherpad that you can sign up to attend. These hour-long discussion sessions are also helpful for instructors and helpers to debrief about past Carpentries workshops and discuss any pertinent questions and ideas around resources and lessons in The Carpentries. Join a community discussion today!

The Carpentries Strategic Plan for 2020-2025
As its last major decision, the 2019 Carpentries Executive Council approved the first Strategic Plan for The Carpentries. By laying out six broad goals, each with its rationale and underlying objectives, that will serve as touchpoints to guide our future actions, The Strategic plan provides a general framework for the direction The Carpentries will take over the next three(3) to five(5) years. This blog post summarises the Strategic Plan.

New Grant Funding from Mozilla Open Source Support Program
Each year, the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program makes awards to open source sustainers which help them advance their work in ambitious ways. At the end of 2019, the MOSS committees elected to make four end-of-year core support grants to a selected number of allied organisations. The Carpentries is honoured to have been selected as a recipient of this funding from Mozilla under the Mission Partners track. We will be advancing our Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility work with this fund. You can read the full announcement here.

Angela Li is Our New Maintainer Community Lead
Carpentries Maintainers work with the community to make sure that lessons stay up-to-date, accurate, functional and cohesive. We are excited to share that Angela Li is our new Maintainer Community Lead. Angela’s work in this role is supported by her home institution, the University of Chicago. She will be helping to reboot our Maintainer Onboarding program, recruit and onboard new Maintainers, and develop a sustainable way to support our Maintainer community. You can read more about Angela’s new role in this blog post. Welcome Angela!

Registration for CarpentryCon 2020 is Now Open
CarpentryCon 2020 is set to take place between 29 June and 1 July, 2020 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA under the theme “Growing Inclusive, Computational Communities and Leaders”. As a non-profit, community-run conference, CarpentryCon 2020 ticket sales will help offset costs for catering as well as venue costs and travel support for speakers/attendees that would otherwise not be able to attend the conference. Read this blog post for more details and get your conference ticket today.

Executive Council
The Executive Council is pleased to announce The Carpentries Strategic Plan for 2020-2025. We first drafted this plan at our in-person meeting in Germany in November 2019, and over the last few months are grateful for input from our Core Team in refining each goal with specific objectives. Read the overview here. Additionally, the 2019 Executive Council officially transferred governance responsibility to the 2020 Executive Council, and are eager to continue work on implementing the Strategic Plan as well as the search for the next Executive Director.

The Executive Council has elected officers for 2020 and appointed a liaison to the Code of Conduct Committee. The officer roles are: Elizabeth Wickes will serve as the Chair, Lex Nederbragt as Vice Chair, Joslynn Lee as Secretary, Juan Steyn as Treasurer and Konrad Förstner as the Executive Council liaison to the Code of Conduct Committee.

Africa Carpentries Community
A Genomics Data Carpentry Workshop was organised by and taught at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology ICIPE in Nairobi, Kenya. Daniel Ouso was the on-site instructor, while Bianca Peterson taught remotely from South Africa. Both instructors shared their experience and provided feedback on teaching a Genomics Workshop remotely in this blog post.

Library Carpentry
Ariel Deardorff, co-Chair of the Library Carpentry Advisory Council, recently started work on a new project to develop the Carpentries community in academic libraries across California. At the onset of her work, Ariel wrote a reflection post thanking the Library Carpentry Advisory Council and community members for their enthusiasm and collaborative work on curriculum and other initiatives.

The Carpentries Acting Executive Director, Dr. Kari L. Jordan, scribed a New Year message for our community. Software Carpentry’s Python Inflammation lesson maintainers request your input for visual and graphical contributions that can help learners better understand and remember the material presented in the lesson.

Community Job Postings

The Carpentries seeks its next Executive Director to spearhead the organisation’s vision of becoming the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills. This position is remote, so all qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, regardless of location. We are working with the non-profit group of Marcum LLP to coordinate the hiring process for this role. Apply today, and help us spread the news. Here is a tweet you can RT.

Public Lab is a community and a non-profit, democratizing science to address environmental issues that affect people. Public Lab has several opportunities open for a Community Organiser, Community Manager, Organizational Learning Associate, Research Coordinator and a Community Technology Fellow. More details about these roles are available here.

The RSE team at the University of Sheffield is looking for a part-time community officer. Apply here. 

There is a Data Services Librarian for the Sciences opening at Harvard. Apply here.

Call for Papers for UseR!2020
useR!2020 invites researchers from around the world to submit abstracts for presentation at its 8-10 July 2020 meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Abstract submissions are due on February 10, 2020 and all abstracts will be peer reviewed. Submit your paper, or sign up to be a mentor for useR!2020 abstract submissions today!

Call for Session Proposals is open for csvconf,v5
csvconf.com is a community conference for data makers everywhere that features stories about data sharing and analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source. The fifth edition of csvconf will be held in Washington DC on 13 and 14 May 2020. Interested in submitting a proposal for a 25 minute talk? Talk proposals will be accepted through to 11 February 2020 and a stipend to attend the conference is available for speakers that may need it. Submit your talk proposal today.

Call for Tutorial Proposals for SciPy 2020
SciPy 2020 will kick off with two days of tutorials (6-7 July 2020 ) that take place before the general conference. SciPy 2020 organisers are looking for tutorial submissions that cover interesting techniques or packages, and that aim to help new or advanced Python programmers develop better or faster scientific applications. Tutorials should be focused on covering a well-defined topic in a hands-on manner. Deadline for the submission of tutorial proposals in 11 February 2020. Submit your proposals today.

Call for Applications to SDSC's Annual High Performance Computing and Data Science Summer Institute
This annual week-long workshop will take place on 3 - 7 August 2020 and focuses on a broad spectrum of introductory-to-intermediate topics in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Data Science. The Institute welcomes researchers from academia and industry, especially in domains not traditionally engaged in supercomputing, or who have problems that cannot typically be solved using local computing resources. This year's Summer Institute continues SDSC's strategy of bringing HPC to the "long tail of science", i.e. providing resources to a larger number of modest-sized computational research projects that represent, in aggregate, a tremendous amount of scientific research and discovery. Application deadline is 3 May 2020. Program details including application and housing scholarship can be found here.

Other places to connect

• Join our various mailing lists

• Going to a workshop or conference? Add the details to our events etherpad and meet other members of The Carpentries community.

• Twitter- Software Carpentry /Data Carpentry / Library Carpentry /  The Carpentries

• Slack

• GitHub-Software Carpentry /Data Carpentry / Library Carpentry /The Carpentries

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

• YouTube

• Donate to The Carpentries

Have something you’d like to have included? Send it to newsletter@carpentries.org.