Malvika Sharan on The Carpentries

Celebrating The Carpentries Workbench

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2023, a significant milestone was reached as The Carpentries transitioned all 43 of its official lessons to a new lesson infrastructure, The Carpentries Workbench. This project, led by Zhian Kamvar our Lesson Infrastructure Developer, was a three-year coordinated effort requiring input and contributions from many members of our community. We asked six of them to provide their reflections on the project, its impact, and Zhian’s leadership.

Jennifer Stubbs, Assistant Professor, Bradley University

Community Roles: Community Session Host, Instructor, Maintainer

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.

Connecting with the Community at CarpentryConnect in Manchester

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of the highlights this year for The Carpentries’ community in Europe was the CarpentryConnect event, which took place from 24 to 27 June 2019 in the vibrant British city of Manchester. Aleks Nenadic, the Training Lead at the Software Sustainability Institute, chaired the organisation team and recently posted a report from this incredible meeting. Here are some of my personal highlights and notes.

Many people I have known over the years while working in the different Open Science spaces were going to be there. This was enough reason for me to not miss this event. Moreover, under the leadership of Aleks, I got to be part of the organisation team and contribute in small ways to this very thoughtful and welcoming meeting. As promised in the program, keynote lectures, hands-on sessions, workshops, and social events provided us with a number of opportunities to exchange both the technical and transferable skills with each other and ensure that we left the meeting with our hearts full of joy and minds full of ideas.

Highlights from the recent Instructor Training in South Africa

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa, hosted its first Carpentries instructor training from 18th to 20th of March 2019. This training was conducted by us - Katrin Tirok (Durban), Samar Elsheikh (University of Cape Town), and Saymore Chifamba (Siyavula, Cape Town), the three brand new trainers in South Africa, and Malvika Sharan (EMBL) from Germany.

Katrin organised this training in association with the Research Flagship in Big Data and Informatics at UKZN and the RCCPII Capacity Development Initiative managed by Talarify. Co-funding the training allowed us to invite participants from different institutions to enhance the networking of future instructors and convey the idea of a larger community right at the training. Our participants came from the University of Fort Hare, University of Zululand, Rhodes University, Mangosuthu University of Technology, TENET as well as from UKZN. They represented postgraduate students, lecturers, professors and support staff coming from the computer, environmental, health, information and library, life, and social sciences.

Bring CarpentryCon 2020 to Your City – Call for Themes and Venues

Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

CarpentryCon 2020 planning begins

CarpentryCon has become the community tested and community approved networking and skills-building event for The Carpentries community. Its international conference last year, and the different CarpentryConnect events across the globe aimed at connecting regional communities have offered a common in-person platform to connect with our international colleagues, develop ideas, gain new skills and experience a genuine sense of belonging.

Personally, this was only one of the several events that I have attended/organised in my career where I felt at home, and as Fotis Psomopoulos says: “this event had a special emotional element unlike any other”. To recreate the same (or even better) experience in 2020, the CarpentryCon TaskForce has already started to plan the logistics for CarpentryCon 2020.

CarpentryCon – Post-conference Report and Call to Action

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The first CarpentryCon

From 30 May to 1 June, 2018, the first ever in-person Carpentry conference, CarpentryCon 2018, took place under the theme “Building Locally, Connecting Globally”, with a vision to bring community members together under the same roof.

The conference was held at University College Dublin in Ireland and comprised keynote talks as well as many excellent unconference sessions suggested by the community members. The unconference sessions included 12 breakout discussions, six skill-up topics, six technical workshops and many impromptu birds-of-a-feather events (see the complete program here).