Recruiting Instructors for Self-Organised Workshops

The original blog post was posted on 2020-08-05, what follows is an update to the original post

While Self-Organised workshops are not managed by The Carpentries Workshop Administration Team, we want to be able to provide you with resources to make the load lighter. When hosting a Carpentries workshop there are many steps in the coordination process. One of the most important components is ensuring you have Instructors to teach your workshop. This can be even more difficult when you have to recruit the instructors for a Self-Organised workshop.

The Workshop Administration Team has seen an increase in both Self-Organised workshops and Centrally-Organised workshops. With this increase, we have also seen a decrease in the amount of available instructors to teach Centrally-Organised workshops. As an organisation, we need to ensure that we are able to provide Instructors for our paid workshops while also providing resources for Self-Organised workshops.

To ensure the Instructor community is not oversaturated with request to teach, the Workshop Administration Team has identified specific places for recruiting Instructors, Supporting Instructors and/or helpers for a Self-Organised workshop. Below are the channels you can use:

• Any local or group-specific mailing list on TopicBox.
• Any local or group-specific slack channel.

These channels were designed specifically for community members to communicate about specific needs and to build local capacity. We ask that you only use the resources listed above. Please do not use the following channels to recruit instructors or helpers for Self-Organised workshops:

• Discuss list on TopicBox.
• General channel on Slack.

These channels are designed to be used to share general information and not for solicitation. The Workshop Administration Team does not use these channels to recruit instructors.

• Instructors list on TopicBox.
• Instructors channel on Slack.

These specific lists are not available because these are used for recruiting Instructors for paid workshops.

If any recruitment messages are sent to these channels, they will be removed.

Recruiting Lesson Pilot Instructors

If you are hosting a Self-Organised pilot of a new official Carpentries lesson - a lesson developed based on prior agreement with The Carpentries, intended to become another lesson/curriculum offered in centrally-organised workshops - the Curriculum Team will help you find Instructors for pilot workshops.

The Carpentries is also keen to support the development and piloting of lessons in The Carpentries Incubator. If you are hosting a pilot for a lesson in the Incubator, we ask that you first try to find Instructors for pilot workshops yourself. Often, hosts are able to recruit certified Instructors from their local community with relevant knowledge of the lesson topic but in some cases this will not be possible. If you wish to recruit Instructors for a pilot workshop, try putting a call out on local/regional community mailing lists, any relevant channels on The Carpentries Slack workspace (the lesson authors may be able to direct you to these), and/or by publishing a post on our blog. Please do not post calls for Instructors to the general channel on Slack, or the discuss and instructors lists on TopicBox: any messages to recruit Instructors will be removed from those channels. If after taking these steps, you find that you need help finding Instructors for your lesson pilot, you can contact incubator@carpentries.org for assistance.

For more information about our Lists in TopicBox please refer to this blogpost. If you would like a local mailing list or slack channel created or need help subscribing to one, please contact team@carpentries.org

We would like to encourage you to continue to coordinate Self-Organised workshops. Please be sure to register your workshop so that we can give you credit and provide you with the survey links to help you prepare for your workshops.

See our FAQ page for more information. The Workshop Administration Team or your Regional Coordinator is here to help you.