November 11 - December 16, 2015: 2016 Steering Committee Election, Projects, Instructor Training and More, Lessons, Workshop Feedback, and Data Carpentry is Hiring.

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Highlights

• The Software Carpentry Foundation will hold its annual Steering Committee election in February 2016. Active Software Carpentry community members are invited to both stand for and vote in the elections.
• The first candidate for the Steering Committee elections is Belinda Weaver. Learn more about her history with Software Carpentry and see what she plans to do for the community in 2016.
• Want to contribute to Software Carpentry, but don't know how? There's a fantastic array of projects including development of new lessons, fixing up old ones, and much more. Jump in or contact us if you're interested in participating.

Other News

• The past month saw a huge amount of Software Carpentry activities including:
• Instructor Training events and feedback
• Many Software Carpentry workshops were run and several people provided great write-ups about these. Write-ups are also available for a number of other workshops from which the Software Carpentry community could learn a great deal.
• A few exciting developments in Data Carpentry
• New lessons were developed and ideas to improve existing lessons were discussed
• Several other posts have been published by community members

Instructor Training and Related Info

• The 6 week online instructor training was recently completed. The final step before qualifying as instructors will take place in early 2016 together with trainees from the 2 day instructor training workshops.
• Applications for the December instructor training came from 226 individuals from 45 submissions across a wide range of locations. We were only able to take 9 of those teams this time around, but hope to work with the others early in 2016.
• Details about the groups selected for the December instructor training and more information about the applications received have been made available.
• The mentoring sub committee has launched Pre-workshop Help Sessions to assist instructors and workshop organisers with general logistic tips. Please join us at future sessions if you are running a workshop for the first time.
• Software Carpentry instructor training materials are now available online.
• A proposal was developed to mentor new instructors. We're looking for feedback and volunteers who want to serve as mentors. More details and the full proposal are available.
• We have also launched a community calendar to keep everyone informed of lab meetings, debriefings, and other community events. Add this to your own calender to be reminded of upcoming events.

Lessons

• CourseSource is an open access peer-reviewed journal for publishing lessons aimed at biological undergraduates. We're thinking of aligning with their standards in our next lesson update.
• The Python lesson will be revamped in 2016. Instructors are invited to join the development teams.
• Philip Johnson developed the Morea Framework for creating structured lesson websites using Jekyll and GitHub. It looks like an interesting resource and possibly useful for our own lessons. What do you think?
• A new lesson on testing was posted by Katy Huff.

Feedback: Workshops and Retreat

• Feedback from instructor debriefing sessions 21 and 22 included interesting ideas about a lesson on imposter syndrome, the integration of all topics covered during a workshop, lessons on cloud or high performance computing, as well as MongoDB and NOSQL.
• Steve Haddock provide exciting feedback about the success they had from running a 12 day Practical Computing workshop. Providing learners with an opportunity to work on their own projects seemed to be very popular and helped a lot to reinforce skills learnt during the lessons.
• Feedback from the first ever global Software and Data Carpentry retreat was posted by the mentoring subcommittee.
• The University of Washington's eScience Institute recently launched Data Science for Social Good - a program that teaches students to apply data science skills to real live problems to encourage learning. A really interesting post about the rationale, outcomes and future plans is available.
• Bartosz Teleńczuk wrote a good detailed post about their workshop at the European Insitute of Neuroscience in Paris.
• The first workshop in Venezuela was run in November. The importance of helpers to make the workshop flow was highlighted again.
• Roman Valls Guimera wrote about their recent experiences at a workshop in Stockholm. Keeping to the time and not committing to cover too many topics came up as very important.

Data Carpentry News

• Data Carpentry launched a fast track instructor certification for people already qualified as Software Carpentry instructors.
• Apply now for the position of Assistant Director at Data Carpentry. Applications will be reviewed from 18 December 2015.

General

• Nick Radcliffe is writing a series of posts that explore whether one-off data analyses are correct. There are some really good thought-provoking articles.
• rOpenSci recently won a USD 2.9M grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust and will be working closely with Data Carpentry in future.
• The Software Sustainability Institute have received GBP 3.5M in funding from UK Research Councils to continue their fantastic work with research software.
• Intel and the Bank of America Merrill Lynch sponsored the first workshop for Women in Science and Engineering in the UK.
• Maneesha Sane was recently interviewed about Software and Data Carpentry by the Podcast.__init__ team. The podcast and a write up about her experience is now available.
• The Research Bazaar, an environment where the importance of socialisation to encourage learning is emphasised, is the brainchild of Research Platform Services at the University of Melbourne. Learn more about their experience as well as past and future events in a post by Damien Irving.
• A recent discussion on the mailing list lead to a post summarising fantastic metaphors that helps to explain for loops. For great tips you can read the summary post or the original thread.
• Educational Engineers use research and implement it in the classroom. Read more about this non-existant profession and how it might come into being.
• Since 10 November 37 workshops have been run globally. For full details on previous workshops please visit our website.
• Several workshops have been confirmed for the next few months. Upcoming workshops can be viewed on our website. Newly added workshops are indicated with "*".
• December, 2015: University of Southampton*, Rutgers University*
• January, 2016: University of Nebraska - Lincoln*, NERC / University of Bristol, University of Washington - Seattle*, Department of Physics, Arizona State University*, Western University*, University of Dundee*, Boston College Libraries, National Networks of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region*, UW Madison*, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, University of Queensland*, NERC / University of Leeds, Wang Center - Lecture Hall 2*, USDA-ARS*, Centers for Disease Control*, University of Illinois*, University of Auckland*
• February, 2016: USGS Flagstaff Science Campus*, University of Illinois*, University of British Columbia Okanagan*, University of Illinois*