Lex Nederbragt on The Carpentries

On the governance of The Carpentries

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When The Carpentries was formed in 2018 by the merger of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, it was decided that the new organisation should be governed by an Executive Council

Over the years, one of the recurrent discussions between the Executive Council, the Core Team and the wider Community has been what the exact role of the Executive Council is. This blog post summarises some recent discussions and decisions on this topic.

Formalising The Carpentries Community Roles & Support Structure

Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past three years The Carpentries has grown in size - we run more workshops, train more individuals to teach, and serve more member organisations. Since our merger, we have also adapted the way we operate to comply with various laws and regulations (e.g. GDPR). What has remained the same is our intention to be transparent and supportive of our community. We are therefore writing this post to provide you with background and motivation for why we are formalising community roles.

Amending the Carpentries Bylaws in 2020

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of the tasks of the Executive Council is to “re-approve [the Bylaws] or an amended version every two years.”

What are our Bylaws?

The Carpentries Bylaws are a set of governance rules that describe the purpose of the organisation, how we are governed, how membership is regulated and how we operate.

The Carpentries Bylaws can be found in the Carpentries Handbook.

The first version of the Bylaws were developed, and approved in November 2018, by the first Executive Council of the newly formed The Carpentries organisation. This meant that 2020 marks the first time these bylaws have needed reapproval or amendment.

The Carpentries Strategic Plan for 2020-2025

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As its last major decision, the 2019 Carpentries Executive Council approved the first Strategic Plan for The Carpentries. This plan guides our way forward for the next three to five years. This blog post summarises the Strategic Plan; the full version is published [on the Carpentries website]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/strategic-plan).

Introduction

The Carpentries was founded in January 2018 via the merger of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry and was joined later that year by Library Carpentry. All three of these organisations have been dedicated to teaching computing and data skills to their various communities. United under The Carpentries we have the opportunity to work together toward a bigger and broader vision of the future.

We are grateful for the Carpentries team - and the Executive Director

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You may know them as team@carpentries.org, or checkout@carpentries.org. You may have met them on a Zoom call or even in person. They are the Carpentries team, the staff employed by The Carpentries organization. And without them, the work we do would have been a lot harder to accomplish.

Their tasks and roles range from administrative and logistic support and management, leading programs and instructor training, engaging (with) the community, membership and infrastructure, equity, assessment and general leadership. Finally we have the executive director, still Tracy Teal at the moment of writing, but she will step down in January, ultimately to be replaced by a person as of yet unknown.

The Carpentries Executive Council 2019 In-person Meeting

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What have 9 people, one library meeting room, one cat, “Ich schaue nur”, all kinds of great German food and beers, and water “ohne Kohlensäure” in common?

November 4th and 5th the Executive Council and Executive Director gathered in the beautiful German city of Darmstadt, near Frankfurt. Our host, Gerald Jagusch from the Technical University Darmstadt, was so kind to arrange for us to use a meeting room of the University and State Library Darmstadt. for both Sunday and Monday. That library was a big building, with lots of students studying there and thus absolute silence was required in the hallways. Luckily the room we used was sound-proof enough that we could have our meeting there without disturbing the students (it helped that we managed to avoid the discussions becoming too heated :-) ).

Executive Council 1st 2018 Tertile Report

Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

May 2018 is almost over and The Carpentries Executive Council wants to provide a brief report of their activities during the first four months of 2018. We are slowly getting to know each other, our role as the Executive Council and what it means that we now are a single organisation.

Executive Council members are listed on the Governance page where you can also find links to the minutes of the Executive Council monthly meetings.

Lex Nederbragt: Nomination for 2018 Steering Committee

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

2018 Election: Nomination by Lex Nederbragt

Who am I?

My name is Lex Nederbragt. I am a bioinformatician (senior engineer) at the Institute of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway. I also have a 20% associate professor position at the Institute of Informatics at the University of Oslo. My research and teaching involve genomics, bioinformatics and programming for biologists.

Previous involvement with The Carpentries

I hosted the first Software Carpentry workshop at our university in 2012 (we were very fortunate to have Greg Wilson, one of the founders of Software Carpentry, teach the workshop himself!). I became a Software Carpentry instructor in 2013 and a Data Carpentry instructor in 2016. I have taught at numerous Software and Data Carpentry workshops, both in Oslo, in Norway and abroad. In 2016, I also became an Instructor Trainer and I have co-taught a couple of Instructor Training workshops since then. Together with Karen Lagesen, I started a ‘Carpentry’ initiative at the University of Oslo which now has grown to a dozen local instructors, and another dozen helpers, and many workshops, some full two-day, standard Software or Data Carpentry workshops, but increasingly half to one-day workshops teaching just one lesson of the Carpentries material.
I have contributed to the unix, git, python and make lesson, and this year, I became one of the maintainers of the Data Carpentry ‘Wrangling Genomics Data’ lesson.
Finally, I am very proud of having been one of the authors of the ‘Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing’ paper that was published earlier this year.

10 tips and tricks for instructing and teaching by means of live coding

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of the key teaching practices used at Software and Data Carpentry workshops is ’live coding’: instructors don’t use slides, but work through the lesson material, typing in the code or instructions, with the workshop participants following along. Learning how to teach using live-coding is best done in practice, with feedback from peers (this is why it is included in instructor training). Nonetheless, this post lists ten tips and tricks to help you get started.

Carpentry week 2016 at the University of Oslo

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Cross-posted from the author’s blog.

In March 14-18 2016 we organised the first Carpentry week at the University of Oslo. After a mini-Seminar on Open Data Skills, there was a Software Carpentry workshop, two Data Carpentry workshops and a workshop on Reproducible Science as well as a ‘beta’ Library Carpentry workshop.

The Software and Data Carpentry effort at the University of Oslo, aka ‘Carpentry@UiO’, really started in 2012 when I invited Software Carpentry to give a workshop at the university. The then director, Greg Wilson, came himself and gave an inspirational workshop – recruiting Karin Lagesen and I to become workshop instructors in the process. Karin and I graduated from instructor training spring 2013 and have been giving a couple of workshops in Oslo and elsewhere.

Lex Nederbragt: What I've Learned

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am a biologist with no formal training in Computational Science. A couple of years ago, the increasing size of my data forced me to stop using Excel, and switch to the Unix command line and scripting for my analyses. In the process, I learned what I needed by mostly by just doing it, but also from books, websites, and of course google.

Almost exactly one year ago, I attended a Software Carpentry bootcamp. I had heard about Software Carpentry and its bootcamps through twitter, started following their blog and became convinced that this was something I wanted to attend. At some point, I fired off an email to Software Carpentry asking what it would take to have a bootcamp at our university, the University of Oslo in Norway. The answer came down to 'get us a room and advertise the event, and we'll provide teachers'. This, in fact, was what happened, and as teachers, we got Mr Software Carpentry himself, Greg Wilson, who taught together with a local teacher (Hans Petter Langtangen).