An update on our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan progress

Last October we shared progress toward our strategic plan for 2020-2025. We are excited to share more updates with you, and to hear your thoughts about the road ahead. Read on to learn more.

Strategic Plan Progress Updates by Team

Business Team

In Q4 2020, The Business Team explored the revenue applications of The Carpentries current assets and organisational strengths. We researched fundraising strategies and took advantage of fundraising training opportunities offered to Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grantees. The information from these initiatives was used to support the development of a fundraising plan. As part of this project, the team launched a mailing list for members of our community who are interested in helping broaden The Carpentries’ impact on the world around us. For more information, please view the blog post: Announcing The Carpentries Philanthropy: A New Way to Get Involved with The Carpentries (2020-10-01)

This work demonstrated the importance of fundraising through donation campaigns for non-profit organisations. Therefore the Business Team planned and launched the Carpentries’ first fundraising campaign. On 2020-11-09, the blog post A Call to Action: Donate to The Carpentries went out to announce and launch the donation campaign.

Community Development Team

In Q4 2020, the Community Development Team did the following work in support of the Carpentries Strategic Plan

• Published Community Facilitators Program content around Feedback Facilitation publicly on GitHub, onboarded and formally introduced our first cohort of Community Facilitators in The Carpentries focusing on feedback facilitation
• Updated our community communications guides to include guidelines and best practices for sharing job posts in The Carpentries, and took on Jez Cope’s suggestion and created an opportunities mailing list on TopicBox.
• Supported the Instructor Development Committee Leaders in launching and announcing the first cycle of Carpentries Mentoring Groups for 2021, and in holding an information session for community members that expressed interest in the Mentoring groups continued work on the semi-permanent Online Workshops Pilot, and organised a blog post centred around communicating the core team’s work involving the Online Workshops Pilot.

Curriculum Team

In Q4 2020 the Curriculum Team onboarded Daniel Chen as the new Maintainer Community Lead, ran a first pilot for a new Data Carpentry Astronomy curriculum, and continued work on the new lesson template. The team has also begun organising pathways for community engagement around lessons in The Carpentries Incubator. More information about those pathways will be available later this quarter.

Executive Team

In Q4 2020, The Carpentries Executive Team oversaw the recruitment of two new members of the Carpentries Core Team, as well as three short-term positions. The team hopes to be able to announce new team members to the community near the end of Q1 2021.

Additionally, the Executive Team helped to coordinate a cross-team effort to solidify support of online workshops and integrate online offerings into all of the Carpentries workflows and structures. You can read about this project in this blog post from December 14, 2020.

Infrastructure Team

In Q4 2020, The Infrastructure team focused on the following in support of the Strategic Plan:

• Continued work in support of our transition to online workshops. This includes updates to our database that allow us to track online workshops.
• Began work to ensure all our systems are in compliance with privacy and security policies. This includes drafting security and privacy policies and creating a risk assessment plan. It also includes auditing our existing systems to track what levels of access individuals have on the platforms we use, and creating systems to modify account level access as appropriate.
• Planning work to create a structure to manage our membership infrastructure, allowing us to better track our work with member organizations, reporting on their activity, and supporting their growth. These systems will be implemented in 2021.
• Training for Core Team to make best use of our technology platforms. Teaching specific skills like writing SQL queries to strengthen Core Team members capacity to access and analyze existing data.

Instructor Training Team

In Q4 2020, the Instructor Training team did the following:

• Trained and badged 14 new Trainers
• Developed provisional leadership for the Trainer community, proposed a governance structure, and opened nominations for an elected body
• Began orienting Carpentries’ assessment for the Instructor Training program and beyond and look forward to putting that to work in a more developed assessment project in 2021.

Membership Team

In Q4, the Membership Team updated the Platinum membership tier to improve transparency of this customisable membership level and ensure the way The Carpentries works with Platinum members is equitable across different organizations. We also reintroduced our Bronze tier as an entry-level membership for organizations who want to support The Carpentries and don’t yet plan to train local Instructors. This quarter also saw the first pilot of a New Member Onboarding program - details to follow in Q1 2021!

The Membership team is also currently recruiting a new Deputy Director or Director of Partnerships to provide planning, vision, and implementation of this program and represent the needs of member organisations in strategic development.

Workshop Administration Team

In Q4 2020, the Workshop Administration team (WAT) did the following work in support of the strategic plan

• Continued finalising the Automated Email project. During Q4 the WAT presented the work done so far to the Regional Coordinators (RC). The RCs were given a prelude to what their new workflow will consist of. These automations will cut the time to process workshops in half.
• The WAT developed a workflow for onboarding new Regional Coordinators. Previously, there was no official onboarding process. During this quarter, the official onboarding presentation was developed along with the agenda and content for a 4 hour session to introduce new RC’s to our workflows.
• The WAT also updated several workflows that would help with the email automation project and the RC onboarding project. We had several outdated instructions that no longer applied to our current workflows.

Get In Touch

The Carpentries year one strategic plan project is located on GitHub. Deliverables have been shared via GitHub issues with labels identifying which team is leading the work, which strategic goal the work addresses, and in which quarter(s) the work is intended to take place.

Get in touch or comment directly in the GitHub issues to share your thoughts on our progress and path forward!