Karen Cranston on The Carpentries

Recruiting new members to the Code of Conduct Committee

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries are committed to providing a welcoming and supportive environment for all people, and our [Code of Conduct]({{ site.code_of_conduct_url }}) (CoC) is the framework for this commitment. The Code of Conduct Committee (CoCC) is responsible for managing the Code of Conduct, handling reports of conduct violations, and advocating for the CoC in the community.

The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee is currently recruiting new members. We seek 3-4 community members who are passionate about ensuring that The Carpentries is a welcoming space, who have time to dedicate to the committee, and who bring diversity to the committee. In addition, it is beneficial, but not necessary, to have previous experience with this kind of work.

We are Hiring an Executive Director. Join Our Team.

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries seeks its next Executive Director to spearhead the organisation’s vision of becoming the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills. We bid goodbye to Tracy Teal, the former Executive Director, on December 31, 2019. Senior Director of Equity and Assessment Kari L. Jordan will serve as Acting Executive Director for The Carpentries until the next Executive Director is hired.

The Executive Council is working with the non-profit division of Marcum LLP to conduct the search. You can find the full job description and details about the application process on Marcum’s website.

Your experiences will help us recommend support for our CoCc

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries has convened a task force to make recommendations for support structures and potential guidelines for incidents outside our Code of Conduct Committee’s (CoCc) mandate. This undertaking has come about as our community continues to grow and expand in the number of workshops we run, communities we reach, and diversity of our instructors and learners. Our Code of Conduct and CoCc are serving its purpose, but when incidents fall outside its mandate what can we do?

Recruiting Task Force Members for Incidents Outside the mandate of The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With a growing community and an increasing number of Carpentries spaces (online and in-person), The Carpentries is encountering circumstances where we feel we should respond to cases of inappropriate conduct that happen outside of our formal guidelines and processes. Our Code of Conduct (CoC) and Code of Conduct committee are now quite mature with a fairly tightly defined scope. There is less clarity around incidents outside the Code of Conduct committee’s current mandate, including incidents that may have occurred outside of Carpentries spaces, incidents that happen within Carpentries spaces that are not reported, or where people would like to share information or get feedback, rather than formally report an incident. These incidents may impact the ability of members to feel safe working in our community. We want to respond to these events in a timely manner and in a consistent way that balances transparency, confidentiality and legal considerations.

Announcing the 2019 Executive Council for The Carpentries

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Executive Council elections have concluded! Thanks to everyone who participated in the election as a candidate or voter. The Executive Council is the governance of The Carpentries, and we are fortunate to have so many people engaged in our community governance.. A summary of the results for both community-elected and council-elected seats are described below.

Incoming community-elected members

Out of the 981 ballots distributed to Voting Members, 247 ballots were cast (25% turnout).

Request for Comment on Carpentries Mission and Vision

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As announced two weeks ago, the Executive Council has been working on developing drafts of the mission and vision statements for the new joint organization. These drafts are now available and we request your feedback through two Requests for Comment and related GitHub issues by midnight (in your time zone) Friday August 31, 2018.

Requests for Comment (RFCs, also called Requests for Public Comment) are a tool used to solicit feedback on planned actions that affect a broad community. These RFCs build on those used during the merging of Software and Data Carpentry to ensure that these central guiding statements serve all members of our diverse community.

Report from 2018 In-person Executive Council Meeting

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The 2018 Executive Council met face-to-face for the first time last week (June 18-19) in Gainesville, Florida in the USA. So, this seems like a good time to give everyone a sense of what we discussed at the in-person meeting, and what is in store for the next several months.

Why an ‘Executive Council’?

First, I want to talk about the name ‘Executive Council (EC)’. Why are we an EC, and not a ‘Board of Directors’? In the US, a ‘Board of Directors’ has a specific meaning, and suggests financial and legal responsibility. Because we are not our own non-profit, but are fiscally-sponsored by Community Initiatives, we do not have our own Board of Directors (noting that CI, which is a non-profit, does have a Board of Directors). We also felt that ‘Executive Council’ better captured the level of commitment and responsibility of the members than ‘Steering Committee’ (thinking about getting credit, often on academic CVs, for the work of the EC).

A Look Back and A Look Ahead from the Data Carpentry Steering Committee

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On May 8-9, 2014 Data Carpentry hosted its first workshop at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). That workshop came out of an identified unmet need for the skills and perspectives to work effectively and reproducibly with data, as data became more pervasive in many areas of research. The biggest difference from other trainings, including Software Carpentry, was not so much what we taught (specific tools), but how we taught it – with a focus on data management and analysis rather than writing software. In all our workshops, we use real publicly available data and the workshop is a narrative, going from start (data and project organization) to finish (analysis and visualization) through the course of the workshop, providing an onramp to using data skills in friendly, accessible workshops. The goal is to teach skills, and even more importantly, to show people what’s possible, and that they can do it, so people have the confidence and enthusiasm to go on to learn more and use these skills in their own research.

Call for Nominations to Joint Steering Committee

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

EDITED 2017-11-07: “Board of Directors” is a legal term and can’t be used for a sponsored project. Changed to “Steering Committee”

As most of you know, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are merging into a new organization, provisionally called “The Carpentries”. This new organization will officially begin on January 1, 2018, with a hugely talented staff and dedicated community already in place.

Call for Nominations to Joint Board

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

EDITED 2017-11-07: Board of Directors is a legal term and can’t be used for a sponsored project. Changed to “Steering Committee”

Call for Joint Carpentries Leadership: Stand for election to the joint Steering Committee of the merged Carpentries organization

RFCs and lessons learned

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thanks to everyone for sharing questions and comments on our recent Request for Comments regarding the upcoming merger of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. Now that the official response period for the RFCs has ended, the GitHub issues specific to the RFCs will be closed. We received comments from individuals across our community representing multiple stakeholders, including the Software Carpentry Advisory Council (representing member organizations) and the community at large (through the GitHub repository, private comments via the Google Form, and personal communication). Those of us working on the merger have been actively considering and discussing this valuable feedback and have been identifying areas requiring additional attention and clarification. We will be publishing blog posts over the next few weeks summarizing our thoughts and identifying future actions for each of the RFCs. You are welcome to continue communicating your questions or concerns to us through new issues in the GitHub repo. Below we describe the context behind a few themes and issues emerging from the RFC discussions which may not be immediately apparent but have factored heavily into our approach.

Timeline for the Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry Reorganization

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Jun 8 & 9, we met in-person to continue discussing how to proceed with the merger of the Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry organizations to best achieve our strategic goals and serve our communities. We are happy to report that is was a very productive meeting.

We spent most of the meeting discussing the structure of the future organizational leadership. We have drafted a number of motions that we will present to our respective steering committees for approval at our next meetings. Among the motions, we will propose that the combined Carpentries governing structure be made up of both appointed and elected members. Additionally, we propose that it is in the best interest of the organization to seed the future steering committee with bylaws, which will be enumerated, written, and approved in the coming months.

Timeline for the the Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry Reorganization

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Survey on workshops for for-profit organizations

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry’s vision is “building communities teaching universal data literacy”. All our activities are focused on working towards this vision.

One of our signature activities is running and teaching workshops. Except for two, we have so far run such workshops only for non-profit organizations - universities, non-government non-profits and government organizations. We have also been assessing the idea of running workshops for for-profit organizations. One goal would be to raise additional revenue to subsidize workshop fees at non-profit institutions and to support long-term sustainability for Data Carpentry. Another is to provide Data Carpentry training and perspectives to people conducting research in industry. We’re still evaluating this idea, and before making any long-term policy we wanted to run pilot workshops and survey the instructor community on their thoughts about workshops for for-profit organizations.

Data Carpentry to adopt Reproducible Research Curriculum

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Karen Cranston

Part of the mission of Data Carpentry is to encourage and enable reproducible research. The core Data Carpentry curriculum teaches researchers approaches and skills that are fundamental to reproducible research, such as scripting and data management. We are also adopting a Reproducible Research curriculum that explicitly focuses on reproducible techniques and some of the next steps, including version control and data publishing. This is an update on the efforts on this curriculum so far, and we expect to have it available soon as a Data Carpentry workshop option.

Our First Data Carpentry Workshop

Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Update: for more information on Data Carpentry, please see their web site.

On May 8 and 9, 2014, 4 instructors, 4 assistants, and 27 learners filed into the largest meeting space at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) for the inaugural Data Carpentry bootcamp. Data Carpentry is modeled on Software Carpentry, but focuses on tools and practices for more productively managing and manipulating data. The inaugural group of learners for this bootcamp was very diverse. They included graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff, from three of the largest local research universities (Duke University, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University). Over 55% of the attendees were women and research areas ranged from evolutionary biology and ecology to microbial ecology, fungal phylogenomics, marine biology, and environmental engineering. One participant was even a library scientist from Duke Library.