Community Calls on The Carpentries

Carpentries in the Libraries Community Calls

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

Time to talk about data and software skills in libraries

One of the strengths of The Carpentries is its community and libraries are great places to foster conversations around data and software skills. There are a number of places where our community can have conversations and get involved - these include our Library Carpentry GitHub, Gitter channel, and Topicbox list. Now there is another option. Starting in August, we will start a monthly online calls series for one hour with the following format:

Green Stickies for 2017: Report from the Happy Holidays Green Sticky Party Calls

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

When Carpentries’ staff score a win, we call it a #greensticky. So for our final community calls for 2017, we hosted two Happy Holidays Green Sticky Parties to celebrate wins we have had this year. The calls highlighted successes, both personal ones, and wins for the wider community.

Among the pluses reported were:

The upcoming Data and Software Carpentry merger
Plans to bring Library Carpentry into the fold
Planning for our 2018 CarpentryCon event
Starting bi-lingual (English/Spanish) teaching demos
Getting ideas for starting a community from the Community Champions calls
Teaching a Software Carpentry workshop for the first time
Successfully using Carpentry-style teaching in an undergraduate programming course
Getting to meet community members in person

Tracy Teal said that calls like these are the #greensticky, and no-one disagreed.

Celebrate the Wins of 2017: Join the year's final community call

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

When Carpentries staff get a win, we call it a #greensticky. These are things to celebrate with a resounding ‘Yay!’

So we decided to turn our regular December community call (our last for the year) into a Happy Holidays GreenSticky Party.

2017 has been a BIG year for our community. We negotiated the Carpentries merger, got planning underway for 2018’s CarpentryCon, trained a whole bunch of new instructors and trainers, and restarted our mentoring groups - and of course a ton of workshops were taught all round the globe. As we wind down for the holidays, it is worth taking time out to think over the great moments of the year.

Feedback on feedback

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

When I started as Community Development Lead, I posted a Google form to ask people in our community for feedback on what they thought was the main issue I should address.

I got a range of responses, from concerns about lesson maintenance to a call for more briefings to help people stay connected.

Also raised were instructor retention - how do we prevent burnout so good people don’t leave? - and instructor involvement - how do we increase the numbers of instructors reading our blog posts, signing up for the newsletter, getting involved in community calls and committees like mentoring?