2015 Election: Raniere Silva
This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
A year and a half ago I read the announcement of the Mozilla Science Lab by Mark Surman and that way I discovered Software Carpentry. Months later, I was participating in the 6th round of Instructor Training, and since then I have:
- taught at all 6 workshops held in Brazil,
- improved the lessons and helped new instructors do so too,
- suggested changes to the new layout of our lessons and helped in the transition, and
- publicized Software Carpentry.
Volunteering with Software Carpentry is one of the things that I'm really proud of doing and I'd be honored be a member of the SCF Steering Committee.
Background
I'm almost sure that I'm the youngest member applying for the Steering Committee and because of it I didn't have amazing things to say about myself. I'm finishing my Bachelor in Apply Mathematics at the University of Campinas after trying and failing to get some undergraduate and graduate colleagues to adopt better research practices like scripting their data analyses in whatever tool they prefer instead of write down on paper by hand all the steps needed for analysing the effect of changes in a linear programming problem solver.
Commitment
As a member of the SCF Steering Committee I'd like to focus on increasing our activities in Latin America, specially Brazil, by:
- Running at least as many workshops as we did last year in Brazil. Running workshops is one of the most important activities of Software Carpentry because is the way that we advertise ourself and draw new instructors.
- Increase the number of instructors based on Brazil. To run more workshops in Brazil is vital that we have more instructors in Brazil (hopefully we will have three more instructors in Brazil after the next online instructor training round). To be sincere I don't know how to do that but I believe that the Steering Committee can help me with that.
- Translate the lessons to Portuguese. To spread our activities in Brazil we will need to translate our lessons to Portuguese. To do that we also need more instructors that speak Portuguese.
- Find ways to support our activities in Brazil. We can't do all the things above without some type of financial support (e.g. air plane tickets and accommodations for instructors). So, if I was elected I will spend most of my time searching for grants and events that could support the cost of our workshops.
More
If you'd like to learn more about me:
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here or send me an email.