Engagement on The Carpentries

Sharing the 2023 Community Survey Evaluation Report

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2023, The Carpentries launched a community survey to inform and prioritise our work and that of the Core Team so we can better serve the community. We asked community members to take 5 minutes to provide feedback on their experience as Carpentries community members, seeking feedback that will help us better understand the benefits community members get from their participation and inform areas of improvement.

We received 200 responses to the survey. It is difficult to identify a response rate without an exact count of the number of active community members. However, this represents 5% of The Carpentries Slack workspace members and 7% of those subscribed to Carpentries Clippings, our newsletter.

Opportunities and Challenges in Localisation: The Carpentries Perspective

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the realm of open science, the power of collective knowledge is magnified when it’s accessible to all, irrespective of geographical or linguistic boundaries. Localisation, in this context, is not just about translating scientific content, but about adapting research, methodologies, and data to resonate with diverse cultural and regional nuances. This series of blog posts, Opportunities and Challenges in Localisation, will dig into the world of localisation from the vantage point of various open science communities of practice. Representatives from these communities will share their unique efforts in championing localisation, the opportunities they’ve unearthed, the challenges they’ve grappled with, and pathways for you, the reader, to engage and collaborate. Join us in this exploration, as we underscore the importance of localisation in making open science truly inclusive, bridging knowledge gaps, and fostering a global community of collaborative inquiry. If your organisation also has localisation efforts, and would like to share your story on a future blog post in this series, please do so following these formatting and template guidelines and send your contribution to balmarzouq@turing.ac.uk.

Multiple ways to follow-up after Carpentry trainings: Benefits, impacts and librarians’ wishes

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What routines do librarians and other information professionals adopt after a Carpentries training, and what other benefits and impacts does this have on their professional life? These questions were the starting point of a survey developed by the Library Carpentry Advisory Group, LCAG in 2021. We reached out to the wider library community with the aim to gain a better understanding of impacts resulting from training, learn more about their engagement with the Carpentries community and to collect their ideas and wishes for current and future training topics. The survey consisted of 28 questions overall and was open for responses between June and August 2021. We disseminated the survey through various channels, including The Carpentries mailing lists and social media channels, regional mailing lists (e.g. Australia, Asia, Africa) as well as direct contacts to former workshop participants and instructors (via host institutions). Overall, 113 responses were received. Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents are based at universities. Further respondents work in public libraries, special libraries or research organizations. Over two thirds (79 respondents) reported that their library already engages with The Carpentries, and several do so in multiple ways. In addition, 19 respondents work at libraries that are not involved yet but they would like to learn more about The Carpentries. Reported job roles (cf. Figure 1, multiple choice) are strongly related to teaching and learning (45.4%), research support roles (research data management 32.4%, scholarly communication 28.7%), and reference and user services more generally (31.5%). Moreover, several respondents manage collections, digital library services, research and development projects and information and data analytics.