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Carpentry Clippings, 19 February 2020
It has been a busy two weeks here at The Carpentries, and we are so excited for our community in New Zealand for successfully holding CarpentryConnect DunedIn on February 11 and right before eResearch New Zealand conference!
We would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the challenge that our community members in certain parts of the world are currently facing, with the scourge that is CoronaVirus right at their doorstep. We are thinking of you and rooting for everyone working to alleviate the issue. We hope with you for a quick resolution to the crisis, and wish good health and safety to all that are affected in one way or another.
Highlights from The Carpentries Community Calendar
Themed Discussions
Themed Discussions and Carpentries Conversations are community calls in The Carpentries that zero in on specific topics, challenges and ideas. Most of these discussions are recorded and made available on The Carpentries channel on YouTube. In case you would like to facilitate a themed community discussion, please fill this form and let us know.
On 7 April 2020, the CarpentryCon 2020 Task Force will host two themed discussions with plenty of updates in the run up to CarpentryCon 2020 in Madison. The themed discussions are slotted for 14h00 UTC and 17h00 UTC, and you can scroll down on the Community Discussions Etherpad and sign up to participate.
Community Discussions
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!
A Note for Discussion Hosts
We recognise and value the time all of you as Discussion Hosts set aside for The Carpentries, and want to make this work best with your schedules. So rather than asking you to host Discussion Sessions at fixed times, from April 2020, we intend to hold discussion sessions at times when our discussion hosts are available. To do that, we are asking discussion hosts to tell us their availability to host discussion sessions between April and June 2020 via this Calendly link. Please share your availability by end of day, anywhere on Earth time on 28 February 2020.
In case you would like more context about the change, please watch a recording of Maneesha Sane's presentation from January 31 and read this updated section of our Handbook.
Community News
All Things CarpentryCon 2020
We hope you are as excited as we are about CarpentryCon 2020. 29 June 2020 is drawing close, and we eagerly await three days of networking and learning in Madison with many of you from around the world. CarpentryCon’s Task Force recently put together a blog post with key updates and highlights for you to take action on in February. Find information about conference registration, travel grants, submitting and upvoting conference swag designs, sponsoring CarpentryCon 2020, and more in this blog post.
Introduction to R Mini-Workshop in Auckland on February 21
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, The Carpentries, and SatRdays are joining forces to offer an intro to R workshop in Auckland on February 21 from 9am to 12.30pm NZDT. You can find more information and register here on Eventbrite.
Workshop Administration
On 24 February 2020, the Workshop Administration Team will start piloting several automated emails for workshops in the US and in South Africa. Emails sent during the pilot will be appropriately tagged. We do not anticipate any hiccups, however, should you notice anything unconventional please let us know immediately by contacting team@carpentries.org. Moreover, we are asking all recipients to complete a survey that will be provided in the follow-up email for your workshop, if your workshop is impacted by the automated emails. Your feedback is invaluable and will go a long way in informing subsequent iterations of this automation project. Read more about the pilot in this blog post.
Webinar on Teaching Software Carpentry Workshops Remotely
On February 27 at 2am UTC (check your time) The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and QCUniversity are partnering to present a webinar on delivering Software Carpentry workshops remotely. “This presentation will aim to convince you that virtual workshops are just as effective at delivering software carpentry workshops, and some cases, superior to face-to-face sessions. The learnings and experiences from providing virtual software carpentry workshops over the last three years at CQUniversity will be detailed, and the talk will highlight what has been found to work well and what has not, as well as providing some tips on how to make your virtual workshop deliveries a success!” Register to attend the webinar.
Carpentries Community in Africa
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.
Here is the calendar of events and meetups happening across The Carpentries community in Africa in 2020..
To stay in touch with other Carpentries instructors in Africa, join our Carpentries Instructors in Africa Google Group or our Slack channel #african-carpentries, request access here on The Carpentries Slack.
What you may have missed on the blog and mailing lists
Research Data Alliance Plenary is set to take place in Melbourne from 18-20 March 2020 and will be a great place to collaborate and network with people interested in data issues internationally. Details about the RDA Plenary, including signup information, are available in Mikaela Lawrence’s post on TopicBox.
Aleksandra Nenadic, our Carpentries Regional Coordinator in the UK, and Software Sustainability Institute's Training Lead recently published a blog post on why more people should be involved in teaching coding and data science skills. Have a read.
If you have recently joined the community, you can get started by reading some of our community blog posts. You can also share your blog post with the Carpentries community. Find more details here.
Tweets of the Week
CarpentryConnect New Zealand took place in DunedIn on 11 February 2020, a day before the eResearch conference in New Zealand. Suffice it to say, we had many favourite tweets to choose from for this edition - here are three of them! We really appreciate our Carpentries community members in and around New Zealand, and are inspired by your wins!
 
Community Job Postings
Code Ocean is on a mission to accelerate the world’s pace of research by making it easy to share and reuse computational code and data between machines and people. Code Ocean is currently hiring a Support Engineering Lead in New York City, and Carpentries instructors and trainers are encouraged to apply. More details available are available in Xu Fei's post on TopicBox.
Virginia Commonwealth University is looking for a non-tenure track Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics/Data Science to teach undergraduate and graduate classes in the Bioinformatics program. https://cbds.vcu.edu/2020/01/22/faculty-position-in-bioinformatics-data-science/
Harvard is looking for a Data Services Librarian for the Sciences https://sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Search/Home/Home?partnerid=25240&siteid=5341#jobDetails=1507705_5341
The RSE team at the University of Sheffield is looking for a part-time community officer: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BYK917/community-engagement-and-training-officer-research-software-engineering
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.
Offcuts
Apply for Travel Grants from Open Bionformatics Foundation
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Read Malvika Sharan's blog post about this, and apply 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: May 3, 2020. Program details including application and housing scholarship can be found at https://si20.sdsc.edu/
Toolshed (Posts from our Past)
Andreas Stefik has worked extensively on computing education and programming tools for the visually impaired. Here’s a blog post from Andreas, written in 2016.
Teaching Programming to The Blind https://software-carpentry.org/blog/2016/09/teaching-programming-to-the-blind.html
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