Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training Comes to Africa

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

North-West University eResearch, UCT eResearch, and Talarify are excited to announce that a Software & Data Carpentry Instructor Training event will take place in Potchefstroom, North-West Province, South Africa from 17 - 20 April 2016.

Our lead trainer will be Aleksandra Pawlik and several of the more experienced South African instructors will also join the workshop to work with the trainee instructors.

In line with a previous post from Belinda Weaver about helping new instructors through the pipeline, this workshop will form part of a larger 12-month programme to help new instructors truly integrate into the community. The programme, an initiative of the three hosting organisations and currently under development, will include supporting instructor trainees to:

• complete the training after the workshop;
• run their first workshop at their home institution; and
• set up and run a user group or Mozilla Science Study Group to support participants from their workshop after the event

In 2017 we aim to bring newly qualified instructors as well as the two or three most active community members from their study groups together again to share experiences and develop proposals for future initiatives.

Our instructor training workshop will run over two and a half days. The last day will be used to introduce the concept of user groups and communities and expose participants to the Mozilla Science Lab Study Group Handbook and other useful resources that could be used to help set up and run these community events. We will also have feedback from Maia Lesosky who started the Cape R User Group and members of the NWU Genomics Hacky Hour Study Group to provide real life anecdotes.

To ensure a transparent process is followed for selection of candidates we have developed a rubric which will be used to score applications based on requirements set out in the original advertisement. We also have an independent selection committee consisting of two international Software/Data Carpentry community members and four South African instructors. We hope to attract at least 50% women and other gender participants for the event.

For more information about the workshop please visit the NWU eResearch website.

If you’d like to learn more about the extended 12 month programme, please contact Anelda van der Walt