Foundations and Funders: Why Should You Sponsor CarpentryCon 2018?

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

CarpentryCon 2018 planning is now well underway. We have chosen a venue and a date, identified keynote speakers, and roughed out a program, but we are still missing one vital piece:

SPONSORS!

Why sponsor CarpentryCon?

CarpentryCon 2018 will teach the practical skills people need to lead 21st century research within academia and industry. By supporting us, you will help develop that next generation of research leaders, people who will attend CarpentryCon to develop the skills needed to take research forward.

Without the generosity of sponsors who share our vision, we will not be able to deliver the event our research community needs. Your support can help us

• keep registration costs low so people aren’t priced out of attending
• maximise participation by people from diverse geographies and communities, including the global south
• provide travel scholarships to allow as wide an audience as possible to attend

These are the outcomes your support can help us deliver:

• Improving researchers’ knowledge and skills so as to enhance the quality and practice of scientific computing and data science
• Helping develop the diverse and skilled workforce research and industry need to innovate
• Fostering networking so researchers can collaboratively find solutions to the problems they need to solve
• Providing networking opportunities for our Instructor pool to learn from each other and extend our reach
• Extending the Carpentries’ community to new countries and disciplines
• Fostering best practice around open, reproducible science, which benefits everyone
• Diversifying the range of voices heard there by supporting attendance from underserved communities

What is CarpentryCon all about?

CarpentryCon 2018 aims to skill up the next generation of research leaders. This might mean learning advanced R or Python, skilling up on High Performance Computing, or figuring out how to lead a research lab or a big project. Sessions will be hands-on, and attendees will leave with practical skills they can immediately use in their research or careers.

By running this event, we hope to improve people’s knowledge and skills so as to enhance research, research outcomes and research productivity across the board.

We also want to do more. We want to widen the number of voices who can be heard there. We want to provide opportunities for people to attend from diverse geographies and communities, including the global south. We plan to hold workshops and skill-ups not just on tools and skills but on fostering attitudes of openness, diversity, inclusivity and reproducibility, because those are just as essential as technical skills ato research success.

We hope your organisation will see the worth of this landmark event in the history of a rapidly growing project dedicated to skilling up a diverse and inclusive global research community If this has convinced you to find out more about this first-time event, you can express interest or start a conversation here.

Who or what are the Carpentries?

CarpentryCon 2018 is a joint initiative of Software and Data Carpentry (The Carpentries), a non-profit project that teaches foundational computational and data science skills to researchers. Within the worldwide research community, the Carpentries have great ‘brand’ recognition and many supporters, including a large number of member organisations, both in academia and industry, who underpin our work financially.