Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2018 February meeting

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 14 February 2018 at 18:00 UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2018 February meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merge

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry have merged. Their Executive Council was elected, they have a new fiscal sponsor and a new logo. Also, they have hired Dr. François Michonneau to lead curriculum development efforts.

This is all very exciting news. And February isn’t over yet.

Windows Installer

We will proceed to adopt Git for Windows v2.15.1, which includes nano, and drop our Windows installer. This should simplify our installation instructions and provide a better experience for our learners during workshops. All the details of these changes are covered in this document which summarises many pull requests and issues over the last 6 months.

Workshop Installation Instructions

In January, a blog post was published with a proposal to enhance the process of customizing the installation instructions on the workshop page. After an initial round of feedback, Raniere Silva, François Michonneau and Rémi Emonet will move the proof of concept included in the proposal forward to a feasibility prototype. The plan is to have the prototype ready in April and, if we decide to go forward, to made it available to instructors in July so workshops in August could benefit from this.

Lesson Release 2018/01

Christina Koch (for Software Carpentry) and Erin Becker (for Data Carpentry) will coordinate the next Lesson Release, planned for the middle of the year.

Maintainer survey on template

As announced on the Maintainers mailing list, François Michonneau is running a survey around our lesson template. We should hear the results soon.

Labels and Lessons

If you don’t know, GitHub rolled out some improvements to labels. These changes couldn’t have come at a better time. Erin Becker and François Michonneau are working to revamp the labels used in the Git repositories that host the lessons. The new set of labels will facilitate navigation around issues and pull requests for maintainers and contributors.

Next steps

The subcommittee will meet again in April to provide an update on some of the topics covered by this post and discuss new requests from the community.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Erin Becker, Rémi Emonet, Christina Koch, Geoff LaFlair, François Michonneau, Tracy Teal and Naupaka Zimmerman for the valuable contribution during the meeting. Special thanks to Christina Koch for the great notes.