Updates on the new Geospatial and Social Sciences lessons

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In December 2017, we made a call for community members to contribute to two new sets of Data Carpentry lessons, targeted towards researchers working with geospatial data or survey data for the social sciences.

There was overwhelming interest from the community in working to develop and publish these two curricula. In the past few months, six new Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons, and five new Maintainers for the Social Sciences lessons have gone through Maintainer onboarding and begun to work with their lessons. Please join our community in welcoming Chris Prener, Geoff LaFlair, Peter Smyth, Juan Fung, Stephen Childs, Tyson Swetnam, Lauren O’Brien, Janani Selvaraj, and Lachlan Deer as new Maintainers on these lessons (Chris Prener and Juan Fung will serve as Maintainers for both the Geospatial and the Social Sciences lessons), as well as Leah Wasser and Joseph Stachelek, who will be continuing on as Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons.

In addition to new Maintainers, a set of Curriculum Advisors has also been assembled for each of these new curricula. Curriculum Advisors help to provide strategic oversight, vision, and leadership for a particular set of lessons to guide the overall development of the lessons. Please join us in welcoming Arindam Basu, Chris Prener, Geoff LaFlair, Katie Metzler, Rachel Gibson, Reka Solymosi, Peter Smyth, Scott Peterson, and Stephen Childs as the Curriculum Advisory Committee for the Social Sciences lessons and Anne Fouilloux, Arthur Endsley, Chris Prener, Jeff Hollister, Joseph Stachelek, Leah Wasser, Michael Sumner, Michele Tobias, and Stace Maples as the Curriculum Advisory Committee for the Geospatial lessons. Curriculum Advisors meet twice yearly and advise the curriculum’s Maintainers in overall strategy for the lessons. Meeting minutes for Curriculum Advisory meetings are available in the group’s GitHub repo.

Thanks to the phenomenal support from the Maintainers and Curriculum Advisors for these lessons, as well as the support of the Carpentry community during the recent Bug BBQ, these lessons are on track for publication. The Social Sciences lessons are scheduled for release at the end of April and the Geospatial lessons will be complete in June.

We still have work to do before publication! Everyone is invited to help as we enter the final stretch for preparing these lessons for their first official release. If you have a few minutes to spare, head on over to one of the lesson repositories and check out the open issues or review an existing pull request. You can also contact the lesson Maintainers on the SWC Slack channel with specific questions.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in building these lessons up to this point. It has been a fantastic community effort. We’re excited to be releasing these lessons soon so that they can benefit researchers in the social sciences and geospatial communities.