The Champions League

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

When people sign up for our newsletter, Carpentry Clippings, many mention community building as one of their key interests. We are lucky in the Carpentries to have so many people who want to build local groups. These people are our community’s champions. They are the hard workers who volunteer their time to organise and run local workshops, recruit new instructors and helpers, teach and maintain our lessons, serve on committees and task forces, and generally help further the Carpentries’ mission of skilling up researchers to do more efficient, reproducible science.

Many of these champions have fantastic local knowledge, and many provide the backbone without which local events such as Hacky Hours, Research Bazaars (ResBaz), study groups or communities of practice around certain disciplines or tools would not exist. What they know about community building is enormously valuable. We would like to connect these champions together in a network together so they can share tactics and expertise.

Our ultimate aim is to develop a community building ‘playbook’ so that tried and tested methods can be transplanted easily to new spots around the world as we welcome more and more people into our Carpentries community.

To kickstart a conversation, Jonah Duckles (Executive Director, Software Carpentry) and I (as Software and Data Carpentry Community Development Lead) are planning to host a Carpentry Champions call at 8pm UTC on 22 August - check the local date and time in your location.

Sign up for the call on our etherpad, which will provide a list of talking points and all the connection details.

We welcome experienced and aspiring champions to come learn from each other about how to best spread the Carpentries approach to teaching and collaborating to new organizations and new places. Come share your stories and learn from each other!

We hope to see you there. We will write up the results of the call, and post it on this blog. We will also start a GitHub repo to capture all your great community building ideas. Stay tuned for more details.