Announcing the first joint Carpentries Bug BBQ

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Bug BBQ is a Carpentry-wide event to improve all our lessons – both existing Software and Data Carpentry lessons, and new releases. We welcome contributions from the Community on all of our lessons. If you want to contribute, but you are not sure where to start, head over to the Bug BBQ website where we will highlight how to get involved.

The Carpentries are preparing to publish the Social Sciences and the Geospatial Data Carpentry curricula on Zenodo. The Social Science Lessons will be published in April, and the Geospatial Lessons in June. This will be the first publication for these lessons. We regularly publish our lessons (SWC, DC) to provide stable identifiers for polished versions of the lessons. This enables referenced discussions of the lesson materials and gives contributors a verifiable product to cite on their CVs or resumes.

This release will include the following lessons:

Geospatial Curriculum

Get involved!

If you’ve made a contribution to one of these lessons, you’re already an author. Help make sure the final product is polished and complete by getting involved in the lesson release.

We are organizing a Bug BBQ to prepare these lessons for release. The main goal for the Bug BBQ is to get the Geospatial and Social Science lessons ready for release. However, if you are a Maintainer for another lesson, and you are available and interested in getting some extra eyes on your lessons, let François know and we’ll include your repository on the Bug BBQ website.

Bug BBQ details

The Bug BBQ will start on April 12th, 2018 at 9am Eastern Time USA (1pm UTC) and end on April 13th, 2018 at 5pm Pacific Time USA (midnight on April 14th UTC). (Click on the links to see these times for your time zones)

Join with the community in a hacky-day to submit Issues and PRs to identify and fix problems and get us ready to publish.

We’ll provide communication channels for you to work with other community members and guidelines for how to get started.

Keep an eye open for more information about the Bug BBQ!

We’re excited to work with the community to release these lessons. Put these dates on your calendar, and we’ll send out reminders and updates too. These lessons belong to the community - help keep them great!

What’s a Bug BBQ?

During a Bug BBQ, the community gathers online to squash and grill as many bugs as possible to make our lessons polished and ready to be officially released.

This is a distributed event, so you don’t have to go anywhere. We’ll use GitHub, Slack, and a website to get organized. If you are part of a local Carpentries community with several people interested in taking part in the Bug BBQ, feel free to organize a real BBQ to feed the crowd. If you plan on getting together, let us know by opening an issue! We’ll add you to the website so other people can join you.

How long should I attend?

The Bug BBQ lasts almost 36 hours to accommodate working hours across the globe. We are a global community and we want everyone to have a chance to participate. Feel free to participate for as little or as long as you want. However, note that contributions made when sleep deprived are rarely the best ones.

If you are a Maintainer, please coordinate with the other Maintainers for your lesson to be ready to review, and provide feedback on the issues and pull requests that you will receive during the Bug BBQ.

Who is the Bug BBQ for?

Everyone is welcome to participate even if you are not familiar with the content of the lessons. We need your help to find typos, issues with formatting, help new contributors submit pull requests, answer general questions, review suggested changes, and more!

If you have questions, please contact François.