Pack Your Bags for Dublin!

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Carpentries are excited to announce that the 2018 CarpentryCon will take place from 30 May - 1 June, 2018 at University College Dublin (UCD).

Yes, we are going to Ireland for the inaugural CarpentryCon!

A huge thank you to UCD for their bid - we are confident that this will be a fantastic venue.

We are also grateful to all the other community members who proposed bids to host CarpentryCon. All were compelling, and it was very hard to select one from so many fantastic options.

However, Dublin is a great fit for all the things we want:

It is a busy travel hub, which should offer lots of easy connections and opportunities for cheap fares.
It is a mid-point between Europe and the USA and Canada, and easy to connect to from the southern hemisphere too.
As a popular tourism destination, it is well-placed to offer a wide range of budget-priced accommodation options.
Lots of tech companies operate there - we will tap them for sponsorship.
The host has great experience running this kind of event.

What we hope to do for attendees

It is important that this be an inclusive event, so we aim to keep registration costs low. We will announce price ranges for registration soon.
We also hope to be able to provide travel scholarships to facilitate attendance from those who might not otherwise be able to come. Stay tuned for announcements.
To help attendees who need to provide evidence of speaking or presenting in order to get funding for travel, we will offer at least one session where attendees can share how they have incorporated Carpentry techniques into their own research and teaching, and/or how they have grown their local Carpentry community. Contributions may be either talks or posters. Details soon.

We would like to get some rough estimate of how many people might want to attend. Please fill in this short, anonymous form that will help us gauge the level of community interest in CarpentryCon2018.

What can you expect from CarpentryCon?

CarpentryCon will focus on three main themes:

Community Building

We will bring members of the Carpentry community together with people sharing similar interests from around the globe. Unlike most conferences, our format will be “come and learn”.

Community leaders will offer sessions on teaching methods, curriculum development, community organization, and leadership skills so we can grow our next generation of community leaders and champions.

Networking

Participants will be able to come together informally to meet peers and community leaders and to share stories about challenges and successes.

What else?

Planning will now ramp up in earnest. Keep an eye on our blog, Twitter and Facebook channels for announcements and updates. The CarpentryCon repo also has a lot of information. Want to tweet about it? Use the hashtag #CarpentryCon2018.