Apply to Become a Carpentries Feedback Facilitator

We invite you to complete this short form. Deadline for applications is at the end of day, Wednesday, 7 October 2020, anywhere on Earth.

In our September 15 blog post, we introduced The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program, a new initiative aimed at designing additional pathways for active involvement in everyday community activities by more community members in The Carpentries. We hope that in the long term, this program will help sustain the growing Carpentries community and support other core programs that contribute to the advancement of our mission. Today, we are inviting community members to apply to join our first cohort of community facilitators who will be trained, mentored and supported to serve as feedback facilitators in The Carpentries.

Feedback is an innate component of human experiences, and the relationship between the two can be likened to one between shadows and objects - even when you cannot see it, you know it is there. Spelling out processes for channeling formal and informal feedback back to the designers of community experiences is an important step in sustaining an existing community and creating avenues for it to grow and thrive.

At The Carpentries, we see feedback as being so much more than information only. As stated in our Core Values, “we value a growth mindset in all that we do and strive for continuous improvement, evolving ourselves and our methodologies, being responsive, curious, receptive to feedback, and eager to learn.” Feedback flows around The Carpentries community in a myriad of ways during our in-person events (workshops, instructor training, CarpentryCon/CarpentryConnect), and through various synchronous and asynchronous communication channels. Karen Word and Kelly Barnes recently published a blog post detailing all the official ways that we listen, and act on feedback in The Carpentries, and we highly recommend reading it.

Although we already collect feedback in many ways as described, we have found that a lot more feedback is currently left unattended. This includes ideas and suggestions exchanged in conversations on social platforms, or those noted down in community calls, collaborative documents, mailing lists, or comments shared under blog posts or in pull requests and issues on GitHub. This is how invaluable and pivotal community input has been for The Carpentries in the past- because of it, we have been able to

• iterate on the Code of Conduct we currently use,
• articulate our Core Values,
• design engaging community events like CarpentryCon @ Home and
• develop an official set of recommendations for running online workshops, to name but a few.

With this in mind, we are excited for all the possibilities that equipping community members with skills to collect and organise publicly-shared informal feedback would open The Carpentries to. Feedback facilitators in The Carpentries would be able to:

• collect and organise community feedback shared publicly and informally in Carpentries spaces for ease of filtering, action and response in the community,
• periodically offer official recommendations and kickstart conversations on issues and items that Core Team should prioritise,
• maintain a public, community-wishlist board that collates community feedback on different initiatives and experiences in The Carpentries
• recommend topics for Carpentries Conversations and Themed Discussions to the Instructor Development and Communications facilitation team as appropriate

Diagram above shows how feedback facilitators in The Carpentries can expect to spend six months as part of cohort

If this sounds like you, we cannot wait to hear from you. Fill this form to express your interest in joining the first-ever cohort of feedback facilitators in The Carpentries. Applications close at the end of the day, anywhere on Earth on Wednesday, October 7.