A Year in Review: Annual Moore Progress Report

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A year ago we were fortunate enough to receive a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery initiative to support Data Carpentry to develop and deliver data skills training to researchers in the life and physical sciences. See our original proposal here. Thanks to the Moore Foundation, this support has allowed us as a community to run more workshops, develop new materials, develop infrastructure and advocate for the importance of data skills training for more effective and reproducible research.

The work of the community has made this possible and we wanted to share our Moore annual report to highlight all the work that has been done in the last year!

• Annual Report
• Output and Events - Excel file

Some highlights from the last year

Workshops

• Since August, 2015 we have run 93 workshops in ten countries, serving approximately 1,700 learners
• We have over 600 completed surveys that show the demographics of our audience as well as workshop outcomes. Workshop attendees are primarily graduate students (31%), but there is also research staff (25%) and postdoctoral researchers (12%) and PIs (12%). Workshop attendees were primarily from the life sciences (45%), with other (21%) and social sciences and library sciences (9%).
• Over 50% of learners were new to programming having never programmed or less than once per year.
• The vast majority (>90%) of those responding to our post-workshop survey say that participating in the workshop was worth their time and led to improvements in their data management and data analysis skills.
• Gender balance in USA workshops (where demographic data is collected) was 51% female and 47% male.
• In the USA we are primarily reaching Caucasian (63%) and Asian/Pacific Islander (18%) participants. Black or African American (3%), Hispanic (6%) and American or Alaskan Native (0.2%) are under-represented.

Instructors

• With Software Carpentry we have run over 30 instructor training events.
• We have over 350 officially badged Data Carpentry instructors.
• With Software Carpentry we were involved in forming a Mentoring Subcommittee who have developed and run discussion sessions

Curriculum

• With CyVerse and SESYNC we developed a Genomics Data Carpentry workshop, with a grant from Amazon AWS for cloud computing resources
• With NEON we developed Geospatial Data Carpentry lessons on working with raster data and vector data.

Strategic Planning, Sustainability, Communication and Advocacy

• Hired a Program Coordinator, Associate Director and Deputy Director of Assessment.
• Developed a Lesson Development Roadmap to guide the development of new curriculum
• Started a joint Partnership program with Software Carpentry.
• Developed criteria for requirements for Data Carpentry workshops and Self-Organised workshops.
• Gave presentations and wrote papers on Data Carpentry and data skills for more effective and reproducible research.

In year one the focus was on building the foundation to scale to run more workshops and train instructors, develop materials in new domains, maintain existing lessons and support our instructor community. We also are working to establish Data Carpentry with Software Carpentry as sustainable organizations. We’ll continue these activities in year two and and also work on scaling to reach and engage with more learners and instructors throughout the world!

As always, great thanks to all the volunteers who make all this work possible!