Administration on The Carpentries

Work Cycle Phobos Wraps Up

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re wrapping up Cycle Phobos. Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Communication around Assessment

What did we do? Data Carpentry launched new pre- and post-workshop surveys. These surveys include skills-based questions and the ability for respondents to provide a unique identifier so that we can run paired analyses. We are in the process of phasing out the old surveys, and the new surveys have been added to Data Carpentry’s workshop template. An R-Markdown report of our old pre- and post-survey data was drafted during this work cycle. During the next work cycle, the report will be completed and the data archived for our website.

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

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.

Announcing Belinda Weaver as our Community Development Lead

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re excited to announce Belinda Weaver has accepted our offer to become the Community Development Lead. Belinda will join the Carpentries staff later this month, please give her a warm and enthusiastic community welcome!

Many of you may already know of Belinda from her work all over the community as a Software Carpentry Steering Committee Member, the Mentorship Subcommittee, the Trainers Subcommittee and a champion and leader of Library Carpentry. As part of our bylaws Belinda will be stepping down from the Software Carpentry Steering Committee on Friday June 16th and the Committee will finish the 2017 term with a membership of 6. For those of you who don’t know her yet, look for her introductory blog post later today. In short, Belinda is a very active community member and a delight to work with, we’re incredibly excited to have her contributing to our community full-time very soon!

Projects for Cycle Phobos

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’ve been enjoying the added focus and sense of accomplishment we’ve gained from working in cycles. If there’s something you’re excited about for the next round, let us know! If you’d like to join (or organize) a team for one of the next few cycles, let us know! Please post an issue on our conversations repo or email ebecker@carpentries.org.

Our third cycle - Cycle Phobos (May 29th through July 21st)

Our third cycle started this week and goes through July 21st. We focused on planning this first week. Here’s what we’re hoping to accomplish in this cycle.

Cycle Deimos wrapup

Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re wrapping up Cycle Deimos! Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Assessing Our Impact on Learners

What did we do? Data and Software Carpentry launched a long-term assessment survey in March 2017. The goal of this survey is to hear from our learners about what has transpired in their work and career since completing a Carpentry workshop. More information about this survey and our assessment efforts in general is located on the Assessment pages of both the Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry websites. The results show that a majority of respondents gained confidence in working with data (65%) and in using the tools we teach (77%), and also improved their coding practices (70%) as a result of completing a Carpentry workshop. Most of our respondents (86%) were also motivated to continue learning after the workshop, demonstrating our continued impact on learners.

Projects for Cycle Deimos

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our second cycle - Cycle Deimos (March 27th - May 19th)

Our second cycle starts this week and goes through the middle of May. Here’s what we’re hoping to accomplish in this cycle.

Our first work cycle, Prometheus

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re wrapping up our first work cycle! Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Planning for Data Carpentry Ecology Lessons Release

What did we do? This cycle we started the process for Data Carpentry’s first lesson release - for our Ecology lessons. During the Issue Bonanza 3/16-3/17, fifteen energetic members of our community and staff submitted a total of 134 issues focused on items related to our lesson release checklist. Data Carpentry staff and maintainers will be going through these issues in preparation for our Bug BBQ (4/6-4/7). Stay posted for announcements about the Bug BBQ!

Updates from the Data Carpentry Steering Committee annual in-person meeting

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Every year the Data Carpentry Steering Committee members and Executive Director meet to review the previous year and strategically plan the next one. This year’s meeting was January 31 - February 1, 2017 in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

We started with a review of the previous year, and Data Carpentry has grown in all of our areas of focus, including number of workshops, number of instructors, types of curriculum, increased output of communication, assessment efforts, mentorship, partnerships, development of policies, involvement in grants, hiring of staff, and moves towards financial sustainability.

Run a workshop this Spring!

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Did you know that 95% of Data Carpentry learners are first-timers? As a community we’ve impacted hundreds of learners around the globe, and 93% of our learners told us that their level of data management and analysis skills were higher because of our workshops!

We’re doing very well as a community, so let’s keep up the good work. We want to encourage you to either request a workshop, or run a Self-Organised workshop this Spring (March-May).

How we’re getting things done

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Adopting work cycles

The Data and Software Carpentry staff have been working together to make progress on projects that are important for our community. To help us do this, we’re trying out a new work process based on BaseCamp’s six week work cycle. You can read their blog post if you’re interested in the details of how structuring a work cycle works. We’re picking a small handful of projects to focus on for each six week cycle, with each staff member working on one or two projects. For each project, we’re setting realistic goals we know we can accomplish before the end of the cycle and holding ourselves accountable to meeting those goals. We’re spending the first two weeks of the cycle planning those goals, dividing up the work into teams, and setting timelines to make sure we stay on track. We envision this workflow having some specific advantages, including:

Plans for 2015: Mentorship and Assessment

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The previous posts in this set looked at instructor training and workshop organization. In this one, I'd like to look at mentorship and assessment, which are two of the biggest challenges we need need to address in the coming year, and are good examples of the kinds of tasks that Steering Committee members will be asked to take on.

Azalee Bostroem did a great job summarizing why we need to mentor our new instructors (and keep those who've been with us a while up to date with changes to our lessons and procedures). The question is, how? Or more precisely, where will the hours come from? I said in September that I would organize a weekly meeting for instructors from recent and upcoming workshops. Only one took place, and saying "we just need to try harder" won't make the necessary hours appear.

The same is true of assessment. Jory Schossau has done valuable service analyzing survey data and interviewing bootcamp participants, and Daniel Chen and others are working hard to revise the instructors' post-workshop questionnaire, but despite several attempts, we haven't found anyone willing to fund a systematic look at what we're actually doing and what impact it's having. Once again, we can either say "we need to try harder" or come up with an alternative plan.

Plans for 2015: Workshop Organization

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As I write this, 228 people have been certified to teach Software Carpentry workshops, of whom 136 have taught in the past twelve months. That's amazing, but as I said in a previous post, growth in one part of a pipeline inevitably turns another into a bottleneck. In our case, that bottleneck is organizational: Arliss Collins and Giacomo Peru are stretched to the limit handling requests and lining up instructors, and we're still not keeping up with demand.

This kind of work can't be done by a volunteers in bits and pieces: the startup overheads are significant, as is the context required to manage each conversation, and there are time when mail really needs to be answered right now, not when it's convenient. We are therefore asking our Partners to organize workshops in their region, and hope that others will shoulder some of the burden as well.

We're also trying once again to build a tool to simplify workshop management. I have started a simple Django application called Amy to keep track of who wants a workshop, who can teach what, who our learners have been, and so on. The data model is mostly done, and I've included a dump of our existing database with personal information redacted to aid further development and testing.

All Amy can do now is display information. What we want to do is add and edit new data. If you'd like to help, please fork the project and send us pull requests—we'd be grateful for your help.

Splitting the Repository

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

United Airlines messed up my travel again last weekend, so I finally had a chance to think some more about how Software Carpentry works and how we can make it work better. Having topic maintainers is one improvement; another, which was discussed at this month's lab meeting, is to break the bc repository that holds our lessons and workshop home pages into smaller and more manageable pieces.

A Proposal for Topic Maintainers

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I can lift ten pounds. I can even still lift a hundred pounds, though my back won't thank me, but I can't lift a thousand pounds. Similarly, while I was able to review changes to our lessons when only half a dozen people were contributing, there are now almost sixty pull requests queued up, some of which have been waiting for attention for several months.

The solution we'd like to try, which is borrowed from other open source projects, is to give specific people authority to maintain specific parts of our core material. These maintainers will not be responsible for developing lessons themselves, though they may of course do so. Instead, their job will be to keep issues and pull requests moving by reviewing, managing discussion, merging into the master branch, and so on.

Help Us Build an Admin Tool for Bootcamps

Fri, 20 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

It takes a lot of work behind the scenes to match instructors to bootcamps, keep track of who taught (or learned) where, and manage our mailing lists. Our current cobbled-together tools are at their breaking point, so Atul Varma, a developer at Mozilla, put together a simple browser-on-the-desktop app to help administrators find instructors based on geography and skills. We'd like many other features—in particular, bulk upload of attendance lists from bootcamps—so if you would like to help us out, please clone this repository and send us fixes and additions.

Many thanks to Atul for getting us started—we're looking forward to not grepping for instructors any more :-).

Introducing Arliss Collins

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The incredible expansion of Software Carpentry over the last few months has been exciting and a little overwhelming, so we're pleased to introduce the newest member of the Mozilla Science Lab team, Arliss Collins. Arliss's background is in engineering and project management, and she'll be working with me, Kaitlin and Greg on bootcamp management, infrastructure development and maintenance, and communications.

Citing Us In Your CV

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

People volunteer to teach Software Carpentry bootcamps for many reasons. We're always grateful that they do, and would like them to get all the credit they deserve. Here are some of the ways instructors currently mention us in their CVs:

Our New Operations Guide

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Amy Brown, our indefatigable administrator, has put together some checklists for people involved in organizing and running bootcamps: