Gratitudes on The Carpentries

Support The Carpentries’ Transition to Greater Autonomy With Your Donations

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you

#GivingTuesday, the global “movement that unleashes the power of radical generosity around the world” is once again upon us. We turn to you, The Carpentries community, first to thank you for all that each of you has done for The Carpentries and our global community. We always say this, and we cannot stress it enough: at The Carpentries we are all that we are because of the generous contributions of our volunteer community members. We deeply appreciate and wish to express our gratitude often for the contributions and support we receive from our Instructors, Instructor Trainers, Lesson Developers, Maintainers, Curriculum Advisors, Lesson Program Governors, Code of Conduct Committee members, our Advisory Committee and Board of Directors, and all other members of our community. In whatever capacity you have given and continue to give to us, we thank you!

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.

With Gratitude to our Legacy Core Team Members

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the ever-changing landscape of the non-profit sector, we often find ourselves faced with unexpected challenges, like the recently announced layoffs at The Carpentries. These moments are never easy to deal with, and striking the perfect balance between pausing to reflect on what has been lost and moving forward soon enough to maintain stability and build on what remains is a struggle that persists for months afterwards. All the colleagues who have transitioned from our organisation were very valuable members of the Core Team, and their contributions over the years to the long-term sustainability of our mission have left an indelible mark on our programs and operations.

Celebrate #GivingTuesday with The Carpentries Community

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Carpentries Community!

Today is #GivingTuesday, a global opportunity for us to use the individual power of generosity to support communities and important causes. At The Carpentries, we value all contributions and celebrate every act of generosity we offer! I have given a great deal of time to this wonderful community over the years as an Instructor, Trainer, Executive Council Member, local community organizer, and Lesson Developer because I believe sharing our training efforts across a community makes them better and working with The Carpentries makes my work better. Today, I am recruiting donors to contribute to the work of the organisation and want to share what I have learned about supporting The Carpentries financially.

Carpentries Gratitudes: 2022 and beyond

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In 2019, the community initiated The Carpentries Gratitudes project as an opportunity to share an appreciation for each other and all that we have been able to accomplish together. We have carried on this tradition each December through blog posts, social media posts and recorded messages of thanks. Although the end of the year is a great time to reflect and show appreciation, we want to provide ongoing opportunities for members of our community to share their appreciation throughout the year. Therefore, starting in December 2022, we will have multiple channels available for you to say thanks.

Happy New Year from The Carpentries Executive Director, Dr. Kari L. Jordan

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I meditate quite often. Last week I participated in a practice whereby we meditated on various aspects of 2021, like resilience, acknowledging our needs, and caring for ourselves and others. During my time of meditation and reflection, I could not help but think about you – The Carpentries community. I will never truly know exactly what this community has endured over the past 24 months. What I do know is that you have shown up, and continue to show up, contributing to The Carpentries’ mission even when it is hard to do. For that, you have my sincere #CarpentriesGratitude.

Share Your 2021 Gratitudes with Our Community

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In 2019 and 2020, The Carpentries published a series of posts thanking the various parts of our community. Since that time, the community has supported The Carpentries through tumultuous times - from transitioning to online workshops and a virtual conference in 2020, to new and revitalized programs like the Curriculum Advisors Committee and the Community Facilitators Program. To be sure, there is no end to what we are grateful for from our community.

100 Members Strong, A Community Accomplishment

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It is hard to believe that from a vision of wanting to teach members of the community the foundations of computational and data science skills, we have grown to an organisation with 100 active memberships. This milestone reminds us that there is a community behind each membership that is receiving access to training and workshops, of which to date, 3,100 have been delivered to roughly 80,000 learners from all over the world!

Thank You SO MUCH Carpentries Community!

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

The image above is a composite of our Core Team’s photos - from left to right,
first row : Zhian, Talisha, Sher!, Angelique, Kelly, Karen, Toby
second row: Serah, Omar, Maneesha, Kari, Erin, François

TL;DR

What a year! As we come to the close of 2020, in all our reflection and retrospectives and reporting and winding-down and planning for 2021 - the most accurate sentiment to sum up how we feel about our community in THANK YOU. There is so much we can collectively say as a team, in fact, we started to co-author our thank you notes to all of you, and seven pages into our collaborative document, we still have more to say, and the wise words of many of you at the back of our minds - short and succinct, that is how all Carpentries posts should be!

Feedback: Remote Teaching of Genomics Data Carpentry Curriculum

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The People

A Genomics Data Carpentry Workshop was organised by and taught at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology ICIPE in Nairobi, Kenya. Daniel Ouso was the on-site instructor, while Bianca Peterson taught remotely from South Africa. We also had amazing local helpers: Caleb Kibet, Careen Natoire, and Gilbert Kibet

We had one completed BSc., three continuing Ph.D.s, one completed M.Sc., and the rest of the participants were continuing M.Sc.s. The main fields of study of most participants were genetics, genomics and bioinformatics. Participants were mostly Windows users and a little under 40% had zero programming experience. We had more females than males attending the workshop.

We Appreciate Library Carpentry

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am incredibly grateful for the Library Carpentry Advisory Committee (Birgit, Yared, Liz, David, Julie, Tim, Konrad, Jeff, John, Tim, Chris, Mark, Phil, and Carmi) for taking on the work of guiding Library Carpentry into the next chapter. Specific shoutouts to Chris Erdmann for his work making Library Carpentry a fully-fledged part of The Carpentries, Liz Stokes for taking on the role of co-chair with me, and Carmi Cronje for her leadership on the Curriculum Committee. We have an ambitious set of goals for the next couple of years and I look forward to growing this community together.

We are grateful for the Carpentries team - and the Executive Director

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You may know them as team@carpentries.org, or checkout@carpentries.org. You may have met them on a Zoom call or even in person. They are the Carpentries team, the staff employed by The Carpentries organization. And without them, the work we do would have been a lot harder to accomplish.

Their tasks and roles range from administrative and logistic support and management, leading programs and instructor training, engaging (with) the community, membership and infrastructure, equity, assessment and general leadership. Finally we have the executive director, still Tracy Teal at the moment of writing, but she will step down in January, ultimately to be replaced by a person as of yet unknown.

Gratitude and the mission of fiscal sponsorship

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In our Gratitude series, we shared our gratitude for our fiscal sponsor Community Initiatives. The Community Initiatives’ team joined in to share their gratitude for the work as well, and we appreciate the great partnership! Check out their post below.

It is Community Initiatives’ mission to help others excel at their missions. As a fiscal sponsor, we share our nonprofit status with organisations like The Carpentries; then, we take on their back office work that includes human resources, accounting, business development, legal affairs and so much more so that they can focus on their great ideas.

We Appreciate the Regional Coordinators!

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How did The Carpentries oversee 543 workshops globally this year?! Two words…. Regional Coordinators! Around the world, Carpentries workshops are organised by a team of eight Regional Coordinators.

Regional Coordinators are the front face of The Carpentries, promoting our work and our culture in their geographical area. They manage workshop logistics, communicate with hosts and Instructors, and respond to general inquiries. The Regional Coordinators work together to support each other and ensure communities can thrive locally while maintaining quality and consistency globally.

We Appreciate Lesson Maintainers!

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We would like to sincerely thank the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lesson Maintainers for their behind-the-scenes work that makes all of our workshops and independent learning possible.

Across our three Lesson Programs, we have 111 Maintainers, who work in teams to evaluate, respond to, and incorporate feedback and suggestions for improvement from workshop Instructors, helpers, learners, and folks who are using our lessons for independent learning. Our 111 Lesson Maintainers support our 51 official Carpentries lessons and workshop overview pages, and help provide feedback on our lesson template to guide its development.

We Appreciate Instructors and Helpers!

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We would like to express our deepest appreciation to instructors and helpers in The Carpentries community. Instructors and helpers all over the world include researchers, librarians, scientists, students, and many others from a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines, career stages and counties. Instructors and helpers not only teach workshops but also inspire others to share their knowledge, skills, and even to become a part of The Carpentries community or to become an instructor or helper themselves.

We Appreciate Community Initiatives, our Fiscal Sponsor!

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some of our community members may have heard us mention our fiscal sponsor, Community Initiatives, at one time or another in the last year, but many have not. This is a testament to the amazing job that Community Initiatives (CI) does supporting pretty much everything that we do in ways that are pretty much always unseen. We would like to shine a spotlight on CI and express our sincere and inspired gratitude for their support this year.

Gratitude to Member Organisations and Champions

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries Membership program will be going into its sixth year in 2020. Member Organisations were some of the earliest supporters of Software and Data Carpentry (though the nomenclature has evolved) and continue to be an invaluable source of support and inspiration within The Carpentries’ Community.

Since 2015, the number of organisations that have rallied around The Carpentries’ mission and vision to support our global community and build their own local communities through Membership has increased every year. In 2015 there were less than five Member Organisations, and this year our website lists over 90 from around the world. At each of these organisations are one or more Champions, Carpentries community members who advocate locally for the use of Carpentries resources and pedagogy and for the support of the global Carpentries community, as well as a host of others who organise workshops, navigate the tangle of paperwork, approve funds, and build community. To all of you, we literally cannot say thank you enough.

Gratitude to the Growing Trainer Community

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

History

The origins of the Trainer Community as we know it today can be traced back to 2012 when Greg Wilson invited a handful of experienced Software Carpentry Instructors to improve their teaching skills as part of a multi-week, online reading group and training course. Within a year, about 50 instructors completed the course to become certified Software Carpentry Instructors. In 2014, the first 3-day instructor training workshop was hosted in Toronto, Canada. Transitioning the course from weeks to days didn’t go as smoothly as Greg hoped, but Warren Code provided a lot of valuable advice that was used to refine the material, and by the end of 2014, the instructor training curriculum had the basic structure that is used today (1, 2, 3). In 2015, Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry began using the same curriculum to train new instructors, and this set the stage for transforming the curricula to serve train all future Carpentries Instructors. At this point in time, the demand for workshops was rapidly increasing and it was clear that our community needed a process for training new trainers.

With Thanks from Carpentries Instructors in Africa

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

The African Instructors Community is made up of individuals who volunteer their time to teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers on the continent. Ending 2019 on a positive note, not only was there a growth in the number of trained instructors, an increase in African countries joining The Carpentries community, but a Regional Consultant for Southern Africa has also been appointed to support the team of volunteer instructors across the continent.

Gratitude from the Infrastructure Team

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The infrastructure The Carpentries Team manages is mostly invisible to its users, and yet it provides critical services to our community members.

To name a few, we run our own Etherpad instance, we have scripts that ensures that our websites display up-to-date information about our [workshops]({% link pages/upcoming_workshops.html %}) and our [community members]({% link pages/instructors.html %}), and we [generate reports]({% link _posts/2019/10/2019-10-21-transition-to-typeform.md %}) based on the results of the pre- and post-workshop surveys.

Expressing Gratitude to Our Instructor Development Committee

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When we onboarded the leaders of our Instructor Development Committee back in April 2019, we were confident their term would be successful. This group brings a wealth of knowledge and experience from all over the world!

From that time, this committee has put in a lot of thought and effort into resources and initiatives that are designed to empower instructors. For example:

The Instructor Development Committee Mentoring Chair (Marco Chiapello) successfully facilitated our Mentoring Groups. Did you miss the showcase? Check it out on YouTube! Marco and the other mentors, Angela Li and Mike Trizna, are also currently discussing the mentoring program guidelines and ways to improve the mentoring experience. Go Marco!
The Instructor Development Committee Discussion Chair, Martin Dreyer, organised countless pre- and post-workshop discussions, themed discussions, and #CarpentriesConversations and wrote a . Check them out. You can get involved with our discussions by becoming a Discussion Host.
Our Instructor Development Committee Secretary (Megbowon Kemi) and Communications Chair (Tobin Magle) kept us informed by publishing minutes from committee meetings and posting to our blog, TopicBox, Slack and Twitter.
Last, but definitely not least, our Instructor Development Committee Co-Chairs (Arindam Basu and Sarah Stevens) organised and facilitated committee meetings, set goals for the year, developed project plans, and helped push the committee forward with ideas to develop our growing instructor community!

But wait, there’s more! The committee successfully completed an assessment project! They analysed the results of our community discussion surveys and shared the results on our blog.

Extending Gratitude to CarpentryCon 2020's Task Force

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries’ CarpentryCon Task Force exists to organise and deliver the next CarpentryCon - a remarkable global assemblage of Carpentries members and friends. The Task Force started working together on January 22, 2019 and has not looked back! Our major planning milestones have answered these questions; the what, when and where? We are focusing on Growing inclusive, computational communities and leaders, between 29th June and 1st July 2020, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States. But beyond this answer, in the planning process, we ended with two top venues, leading to the inception of the annual CarpentryCon cycle from bi-annual, and a planned venue for CarpentryCon 2021 to be a pass-on baton to the next Task Force. Next year’s CarpentryCon has achieved a lot in the planning this year led by Christina and Ouso.

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.

With gratitude, to the Code of Conduct Committee

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We have a deep appreciation for the Code of Conduct Committee (CoCc). Though its main goal is to maintain, update, and enforce The Carpentries Code of Conduct (CoC), this committee has contributed to instructor training material (pull requests #950 and issue #897 , clarified overlapping responsibilities with core team members and the Executive Council, onboarded two new members (welcome Ivo and Benjamin!) and finalised its governance structure.

Additionally, the committee contributed to recommendations for incidents that fall outside its mandate (see recommendations), all while exhibiting our core values.

Extending Gratitude to the Executive Council for Governance in 2019

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

The Executive Council is the governing body of The Carpentries responsible for its strategy and sustainability. As a community council, they are the true stewards of the organisation, guiding the project, listening to, reflecting on and making decisions on behalf of the community. That is a big responsibility!

The Carpentries Executive Council established in 2018 with the formation of the project. From the onset, it had community-elected and council-elected positions to both represent the community and ensure a set of diverse perspectives and skills necessary for the functioning of this council.

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.