Serah Njambi Kiburu on The Carpentries

Director of Community Development and Engagement Transition

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Announcement from The Carpentries

We are writing to share the news that The Carpentries Director of Community Development and Engagement and Community Development Team lead, Serah Njambi Kiburu, is departing her position to pursue new opportunities. Her final working day at The Carpentries will be July 30. Erin Becker, the Associate Director of The Carpentries, will lead the Community Development team while we search for Serah’s successor.

“Serah is truly a thought leader in open science, and one of the most caring and compassionate advocates I have ever met. One of the many things I learned in my time working with Serah is the value of feedback, and creating space for all the voices to be heard,” says Kari L. Jordan, Executive Director of The Carpentries, ”Several programs that are core to our mission were developed by Serah during her time with The Carpentries. Her legacy is sound, and the organisation is better because of her contributions. We will miss you Serah!”

Sharing our new Code of Conduct Facilitators Module

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In summary, while maintaining the role of the Code of Conduct Committee (CoCc) as a Code of Conduct enforcement body, in the near future, Code of Conduct Facilitators will be trained and actively available to the community as a trusted and neutral point of counsel on Code of Conduct-related matters, monitor Carpentries online spaces and physical meetings and escalate Code of Conduct incidents for the attention of the CoCc or otherwise certify that the community is functioning as expected.

Attend an Onboarding Session to Become a Carpentries Discussion Host

Thu, 20 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Community Discussion sessions have metamorphosed over the years within The Carpentries community. In addition to the traditional format which prioritises discussion to prepare newly-trained instructors for the three-step checkout process after Instructor Training, The Carpentries holds topical community calls, known as Themed Discussions, aimed at skill-sharing, ideas exchange and sharing of updates around specific subjects and about ongoing community activities in The Carpentries.

Invitation to Become a Discussion Host in The Carpentries

Community discussions are specifically designed for pre- and post-workshop discussion, and serve as a recurring space for instructors and helpers to ask questions and exchange ideas around the teaching Carpentries workshops, and to debrief after teaching. They also serve as places for networking and for peer mentorship between experienced and new instructors.

Pondering on the Question of Community Sustainability

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries has been around for a long while - Greg Wilson’s telling of the first ever Carpentries-style workshop dates back to July 1998 with initial discussion and ideation sessions about what is now The Carpentries starting three years prior in 1995. In 2021,this amounts to over 20 years of iterative design on The Carpentries style of teaching and lesson content, immense community collaboration and input on dozens of initiatives, peer mentoring and collective ownership of different processes — all of which have contributed to the healthy and impactful status that this community-led organisation holds in the present day.

Prioritising Accessibility in Organising Online Events

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was also cross-posted on Code for Science and Society’s Event Fund blog and the CSCCE blog.

Accessibility is to equity as a foundation is to a house. A well-rounded and intentional approach to making your community spaces and resources accessible levels the playing field for all in your community, and benefits everyone in the long-run.

December 3, 2020 was last year’s International Day for People with Disabilities. Under the theme, ‘Not all Disabilities are Visible,’ the day’s focus was on spreading awareness and understanding of disabilities that are not immediately apparent, such as mental illness, chronic pain or fatigue, sight or hearing impairments, diabetes, brain injuries, neurological disorders, learning differences and cognitive dysfunctions, among others.

Improving Accessibility in The Carpentries

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Because The Carpentries has a people-first and access-for-all mindset, one of the considerations that guides our choice of online platforms for community use in The Carpentries is the ease, clarity, and consistency with which people can interact and collaborate in real time (community calls, study groups, instructor training and workshop sessions, etc) and asynchronously (sharing opportunities, contributing to resources, asking questions etc).

In the past, for in-person workshops and activities across The Carpentries, we have offered guidelines on how to ask participants about their accessibility needs and worked to make our in-person gatherings accessible. Over the last year, as all our community activity shifted online, from our workshops, to our biennial community conference, it became apparent that we needed to do more to promote equitable access and make our online spaces more accessible. Carpentries Conversation 26 has valuable feedback that we are working on acting on and our Feedback Facilitators have been working to collate suggestions that community members have made over the years on the issue of accessibility in different Carpentries communications channels. They will share more about this in a future blog post.

Help Inform Translation Priorities for Carpentries Resources

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Translation efforts in The Carpentries are community-led, and we recommend that you consider joining our internationalisation community channel in The Carpentries Slack to stay informed.

To help inform the efforts of community members interested in translating (i)resources for use in local Carpentries events like CarpentryConnects and (ii) all other resources currently available for the global Carpentries community in English, we request your input on the set of questions below:

We would like to hear about the relationship between spoken languages and the languages used for instruction in institutions where you are located. You can type your responses under issue 27 in The Carpentries Conversations repository or in this Google Doc using these prompts:

The Carpentries at rstudio::global(2021)

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

rstudio::global (2021) is a conference for R and RStudio users that is set to take place on Thursday, January 21 2021. The 24-hour virtual event will kick off at 8am PT / 16:00 GMT / 01:00 JST, and here is what time that will be for you. To cater well to all timezones, rstudio::global(2021)’s schedule spans 12 hours, and repeats from the beginning at the half-way point. Registration to participate in the conference is free for everyone to secure your ticket and attend at your convenience.

Meet The Carpentries Feedback Facilitators

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Community Facilitators in The Carpentries are people who are empowered to advocate for others in the community and guide community members as they navigate The Carpentries global community. When we set out to start designing The Carpentries Community Facilitators program in Q2 2020, one of our main goals was to onboard our first cohort of community facilitators, focussing on Feedback Facilitation, before the close of 2020. We are very pleased to introduce the first ten Carpentries Feedback Facilitators in this blog post.

Hacktoberfest 2020 - Glosario Contribution Drive

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In July The Carpentries announced Glosario, an open source, multilingual glossary of data science terms. Since that blogpost was published, almost 200 more terms have been added to the glossary in English, along with many more definitions in other languages. In the future, the resource will help lesson developers and maintainers make their materials more findable, allow learners to identify paths between lessons, and support non-English speaking learners in grasping lesson material.

Apply to Become a Carpentries Feedback Facilitator

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We invite you to complete this short form. Deadline for applications is at the end of day, Wednesday, 7 October 2020, anywhere on Earth.

In our September 15 blog post, we introduced The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program, a new initiative aimed at designing additional pathways for active involvement in everyday community activities by more community members in The Carpentries. We hope that in the long term, this program will help sustain the growing Carpentries community and support other core programs that contribute to the advancement of our mission. Today, we are inviting community members to apply to join our first cohort of community facilitators who will be trained, mentored and supported to serve as feedback facilitators in The Carpentries.

Introducing The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Community Facilitators Program is a new initiative in The Carpentries that seeks to create new pathways for active involvement in everyday community activities by more community members. This program will help sustain the growing Carpentries community and support other core programs that contribute to the advancement of our mission.

In 2019, Kari L. Jordan, Tracy Teal, Sher! Hurt and Serah Njambi Kiburu constituted a Core Team working group that discussed how to support Carpentries community members through conflict. This working group identified the need for a task force to make recommendations for dealing with incidents that come up in our community spaces and whose review and resolution fall outside the mandate of The Carpentries Code of Conduct (CoC) committee (see task force charter). One of the key recommendations from this Task Force was the institution of a Code of Conduct Facilitators Program to serve as an added layer of support for our community before incidents are reported to the Code of Conduct Committee (CoCc). More specific suggestions about how the Code of Conduct Facilitators Program could operate were first proposed by Malvika Sharan, the 2020 Code of Conduct committee chair in Q1 2019. In summary, while maintaining the role of the CoCc as a CoC enforcement body, Code of Conduct Facilitators would actively monitor Carpentries online spaces and physical meetings and share potentially negative behaviours or otherwise certify that the community is functioning as expected.

Meet our 2020-2021 Cohort of Instructor Development Committee Leaders

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Instructor Development Committee (IDC) leaders in The Carpentries lead efforts to organise Community Discussions, set up mentoring cycles, and advocate for activities and initiatives that promote professional development, equity and inclusivity for Carpentries instructors. During their year-long term, IDC leaders also work on special projects aimed at improving instructor resources in The Carpentries, and facilitate conversations with other Carpentries instructors to brainstorm and discuss matters arising.

The Instructor Development Committee (formerly known as the Mentoring Subcommittee) was established in 2015 to develop and maintain a mentorship program to support instructors as they progress through training, teaching, curriculum development, and other community-related activities. The committee helps promote community-building and networking by providing virtual spaces where instructors from all over the world can share teaching success stories and discuss strategies for overcoming challenges. You can find more information about the IDC and its activities in the Instructor Development section of our handbook.

What Will Constitute CarpentryCon @ Home Fireside Chat Discussions?

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the final week of CarpentryCon @ Home. In more than thirty sessions over the last seven weeks, community members and friends of The Carpentries have come together to facilitate and take part in hands-on sessions, discussions, social meetups, sprints, and more. This week, several community organisers will sit down over two fireside chats to discuss ‘How can we continue to grow inclusive, computational communities and leaders beyond CarpentryCon @ Home?’

2020 - 2021 IDC Leadership Call for Applications

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We invite you to complete this short form. Deadline for applications is at the end of day, Monday, 24 August 2020, anywhere on Earth.

May 2020 officially marked the close of a year-long term for our 2019 Instructor Development Committee Leaders. We want to take this opportunity to thank Sarah Stevens, Arindam Basu, Tobin Magle, Marco Chiapello, Dr. Megbowon Kemi, and Martin Dreyer for their engagement, and for lending their time and expertise to different activities that served to improve instructors’ experiences in our community.

Lessons Learned - Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online in Sweden, May 2020

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In May 2020, 16 learners from three universities in Stockholm, Sweden and two other Swedish universities attended online workshops focused on Carpentries SQL, OpenRefine, and Python lessons. Taught over the course of four days, the three hour sessions were led by a team of one instructor, three helpers, and a “Zoom-DJ” who kept track of things in the Zoom room, ensured a welcoming environment for the learners, encouraged questions, kept track of the time, and managed the breaks and break-out rooms. During each session, the instructor, helpers, and Zoom DJ appended their titles to their names and had video on to make it easier for participants to ask for help. Workshop leads switched between instructor and helper roles in the different sessions.

Going Online: How we organised the first ever virtual csvconf

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A brief history about csvconf
Weighing the decision to hold csv,conf,v5 online

Moving online - The challenge
Moving online - The opportunity

Planning an online conference

Organizing Team
Selecting Talks
Creating a Schedule
Tickets and Registration
Code of Conduct
Communication via Slack
Picking a video conference platform

Zoom Concerns
Crowdcast Benefits
Crowdcast Challenges

#Commallama
A big thank you to our community and supporters
Looking Ahead - The future of csv,conf

A brief history

csv,conf is a community conference that brings diverse groups together to discuss data topics, and features stories about data sharing and data analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source. Over the years we have had over a hundred different talks from a huge range of speakers, most of which you can still watch back on our YouTube Channel.

csv,conf,v1 took place in Berlin in 2014 and we were there again v2 in 2016 before we moved across the Atlantic for v3 and v4 which were held in Portland, Oregon in the United States in 2017 and 2019. For csv,conf,v5 we were looking forward to our first conference in Washington DC, but unfortunately, like many other in-person events, this was not going to be possible in 2020.

People have asked us about our experience moving from a planned in person event to one online, in a very short space of time, so we are sharing our story with the hope that it will be helpful to others, as we move into a world where online events and conferences are going to be more prevalent than ever.

The decision to take the conference online was not an easy one. Until quite late on, the question csvconf organizers kept asking each other was not “how will we run the conference virtually?” but ‘will we need to cancel?’. As the pandemic intensified, this decision was taken out of our hands and it became quickly clear that cancelling our event in Washington DC was not only the responsible thing to do, but the only thing we could do. csvconf's #CommaLlama

Reading and Reflection Days for The Carpentries Core Team

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In several conversations between Carpentries Core Team members, it has come up that, with all of the day to day work in community engagement, workshop operations, infrastructure, and supporting our various community segments from Members and Trainers to Maintainers and Instructors, we sometimes run short on time to (i) read up on resources that could help us in the work we do to support The Carpentries and (ii) reflect on the programs we support and how they can be improved. As members of the Core Team, we would like to reflect more on our existing workflows as well as how they can be improved so that our processes, programs, and infrastructure are in line with our core values. Sometimes we just need a day to read and reflect.

2019 Reports and our Annual Reports Page

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Two pivotal resources for The Carpentries community were published for the first time in 2019. The first is our 2018 Annual Report which was released in early 2019, and the second is our 2018 Financial Updates Report which was publicised by our Executive Council in mid-2019. Both reports have been an invaluable reference in communicating with new and existing community members, potential funders, member organisations, and others.

Today, The Carpentries is excited to release our 2019 Annual Report and 2019 Financial Report, and to share a central resource we have created to aggregate all Carpentries reports for ease of access.

Carpentries Conversations: The Carpentries Teaching of Git and GitHub

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Prompted by various tweets by our community members, and related community deliberations in The Carpentries’ Slack and TopicBox in December 2019, The Carpentries Core Team saw an opportunity for broader community discussions around instructors’ interest or comfort in teaching git and GitHub as outlined in our lesson programs.

We conferred with The Carpentries’ Curriculum Advisory Group who agreed to facilitate a series of Themed community discussions around The Carpentries Teaching of GitHub. This blog post summarises community input from three separate discussions in December 2019, and outlines a way forward for continued deliberations.

Introducing The CarpentryConnect Planning Kit

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CarpentryConnects are community convenings, organised to bring together community members of The Carpentries that are in close proximity geographically for knowledge exchange, collaboration, and networking. The CarpentryConnect Planning Kit provides checklists, templates, recommendations for best practices and resources to serve as guides in planning and carrying out CarpentryConnect events.

We prioritised the development of a first version of this resource in Q1 2020 because:

Our global online community has grown in leaps and bounds over the years and we have seen local community building efforts around the world begin to happen,

local and regional Carpentries convenings outside of instructor training and Carpentries workshops have become more popular in the last year, and

community members are currently responsible for the planning and execution of the events with minimal input from the Core Carpentries team,

With CarpentryConnect Planning Kit, we hope to lower the barrier to entry in putting together these events, so community members feel empowered to organise for plenty of convenings that add value to their work, and want to help standardise formats and uphold the quality of Carpentries events that are run in regional and local settings.

More Community-Contributed Tips for Teaching Online

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We recently published a first round on community-contributed tips for teaching online. Today, we are publishing the second and final round of tips from our community members.

As communicated by Omar Khan on TopicBox on 26 March, The Carpentries has now set up a COVID-19 Response Task Force, and a more elaborate set of recommendations will be shared by its members in the coming weeks.

This post has been made possible by contributions from Julie Vecchio, Hanna Varachkina, Darya Vanichkina, Angelique Trusler and two anonymous contributors. Thank you!

Tips for Teaching Online from The Carpentries Community

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In The Carpentries #general Slack channel on Friday, 13 March 2020, several community members were discussing different approaches to employ in collaborating online, and specifically around curriculum development and teaching workshops. Lex Nederbragt and Laura Acion had a great thought to consolidate experiences in teaching and learning online from members of The Carpentries community, and share this in a more accessible space for others to read and adapt them for their needs. In the wake of COVID-19 and due to stringent measures taken to help curb its spread around the world, remote teaching and learning is quickly becoming a priority for institutions around the world. Acting on Lex’s and Laura’s suggestions, we put out a call asking The Carpentries community to share from their extensive experience in teaching and learning online.

CarpentryConnect Events in 2020

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The first community conference designed for the global Carpentries community, CarpentryCon 2018, was held in Dublin, Ireland between May 30 and June 1 of that year.

Since then, community members have expressed great interest in coming together more frequently to exchange ideas and knowledge, collaborate and network, and have found the opportunity to do so in smaller events in their regions and cities. To create a distinction between the global Carpentries community conferences - CarpentryCon, and regional community convenings, The Carpentries dubbed the latter CarpentryConnects.

Thank You for Supporting our Outreach Efforts

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Clear and timely communications play a big role in making community activities across The Carpentries happen effectively. From sharing opportunities available to community members, highlighting resources relevant to topical discussions, picking meeting times, collaborating on different projects and offering compelling narratives of The Carpentries, these all help connect our community and move our collaborative work forward.

Drafting, revising and releasing a communications strategy, tailored for our community would not have been possible in the first half of 2019 without the elaborate feedback, timely reviews and contributions from many in our community. Thank you.

Introducing The Carpentries Gratitudes Series

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is a community-led organisation. All year round, community members work diligently to equip each other with relevant skills and create welcoming spaces, both online and offline, for resource sharing, discussion and collaborative work.

This year, our community’s dedication and values have been epitomised through the ideas, strategies and outputs from Carpentries sub-communities like the Maintainers, Regional Coordinators, Trainers, Instructors and Helpers; and through committees and Task Forces like Instructor Development, Code of Conduct and CarpentryCon 2020 organisers; and by way of individual contributors that facilitate and sit in for our community calls, write blog posts and documentation and take part in initiatives like The Carpentries Tagathon and ongoing Internationalisation efforts. This list is in no way exhaustive, and one blog post would not be sufficient to shine a light on, and thank our community for all the ways they have made The Carpentries what it is in 2019.

Introducing The Carpentries Core Values

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2019, at The Carpentries in-person team meeting, the Values project was earmarked as one of the team’s top priorities for the year. Towards the end of the second quarter, on the week of June 18, 2019, the project was green-lighted and work on it began.

We have spent five months in consultation with The Carpentries community about their perceptions of each other, our community culture, and the nature of interactions in spaces where our community members convene. We have developed a better understanding of our community’s expectations, and had time to interrogate some of our assumptions and reflect on what is currently working well and what is not. From community recommendations, The Carpentries has also identified some of the ways we need to shift our approach in the future so as to remain responsive and relevant to our community as its composition and needs evolve.

The Carpentries Tagathon - Our Hacktoberfest Initiative

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Love our blog posts? Want to read more of them, help make them easier to find and share them with others? Join our Tagathon October 28 - November 1 to add tags to past posts and connect with others in the community about what we learn, share and teach.

Our community at The Carpentries thrives because individuals are eager to learn from and impart their knowledge on each other. Knowledge sharing is not the preserve of our hands-on, interactive, programming workshops. Rather, from Australia, Japan, Costa Rica, South Africa, the UK and Norway, community members have time and again found new, exciting, sometimes unconventional and memorable ways to interact with each other.

Q3 and Q4 Project Work at The Carpentries

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In May, we shared our vision and goals for our core team’s work in Q2. In this post, we lay out our accomplishments on that work, and also on our Q3 projects. There’s a lot that we’ve been working on! If you’re interested in a particular team’s work, you can navigate directly to their projects using the links below.

Business Team

Community Development Team

Curriculum Team

Instructor Training Team

Infrastructure Team

Membership Team

Workshop Administration Team

The projects we select for our quarterly cycles are designed to give us time to focus on our operational priorities (operational efficiency, accessibility, revenue generation, and compliance), while continuing to perform all of our ongoing work. Ongoing work includes supporting workshops, instructor training events, lesson development and maintenance, communications, and much more! Over the course of the quarter, we share our accomplishments and challenges with each other, stay in touch on how our individual work affects the whole team, and learn from each other.

Carpentries Values Project - An Update and Call for Input

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When we set out to ask The Carpentries community for input on August 1, we spelled out the rationale of The Carpentries Values project in this way:

Shared values and goals have long been the starting point of communities of practice as they identify changes they want to see and start working together towards these changes. The Carpentries started out with a clear goal - teaching foundational computational skills to researchers worldwide. Something that is also important and unique about our community is how we work and engage with each other. As a community, values are important to us and we consider that we have a set of shared values. However, we have not yet articulated what these values are.

Releasing The Carpentries Communications Strategy and Implementation Plan

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The efforts of thousands of dedicated and passionate individuals and ally organisations have allowed The Carpentries to extend reach and develop local presence in new regions around the world. This has, in turn, resulted in a huge spike in the size of our community of scientists, librarians, researchers and technologists and in the quantity and quality of resources produced under The Carpentries banner over the years. To every mentor, trainer, maintainer, instructor, regional coordinator, contributor, learner, and team, council, committee and task force member that has worked to make this possible, we thank you.

Q2 Project Work at The Carpentries

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some of The Carpentries team at an Improv session in January 2019

Zip Zap Zop is a team building activity that The Carpentries team loved and stressed over in equal measure at an Improv session we all attended in January 2019. Standing in a circle, the game started out slow and we all felt comfortable with it, enjoyed it even. But as time went by and our facilitator nudged us to pick up the pace, we all experienced the adrenaline and pressure that comes with increased urgency and demand for our attention and whittled-down focus in any activity, and had the opportunity to empathise with the overwhelmed among us, and marvel at the resilience of a select few.

Introducing the New Carpentries Instructor Development Committee

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Instructor Development Committee (originally the Mentoring Subcommittee) was established in 2015 to develop and maintain a mentorship program to support instructors as they progress through training, teaching, curriculum development, and other community-related activities. The committee helps promote community-building and networking by providing virtual spaces where instructors from all over the world can share teaching success stories and discuss strategies for overcoming challenges. Any Carpentries community member is welcome to join the Instructor Development Committee. You can find more information in the Instructor Development section of our handbook.

Communications at The Carpentries

Tue, 02 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is a project merger between Software Carpentry, Library Carpentry and Data Carpentry, with a strong community of librarians, researchers and technologists brought together by two distinct events of 2018, and a common goal in mind - to build and grow communities of practice around computational skills development for researchers and librarians. 2019 marks twenty years of iterations on The Carpentries pedagogical model, and the ninth year of executing our current focus on community edification by sharing data science and coding skills.

Growing The Carpentries Community in Africa: Hiring a Regional Coordinator

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries activities in Africa have been growing through exemplary volunteer work of the community and outstanding workshop coordination and community leadership from Anelda van der Walt. We are now looking to hire a Regional Coordinator to continue this work and support the community and workshops as activity in Africa grows. This position will join our team of Regional Coordinators - read more about that group and the work they do to support their regional communities.

Welcoming the New Community Engagement Lead

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that Serah Njambi Kiburu will be joining The Carpentries as Community Engagement Lead, starting 11 January 2019.

Serah has over five years experience as an open data and open source advocate, and brings with her a wealth of experience in community building and coordination, in developing and implementing curricula and outreach strategies, and translating complex technical topics into content that is easy to understand. Most recently, she worked as a Developer Advocate for Open Knowledge International. Before that, she worked with Code for Africa. Through her work, she has developed a wealth of experience developing and teaching technical workshops and engaging with communities around technical training.