Highlighting our strategic plan efforts to support local community building

At the end of each quarter the Core Team spends time individually and collectively reflecting on the progress the organisation has made toward our Strategic Plan for 2020-2025. This exercise is truly meaningful for us as it speaks to our commitment to one of our 9 Core Values: Act Openly. By sharing semi-regular updates about our strategic plan with our community, we hope to keep you engaged in our growth and development. To follow this work closely watch our strategic-plan GitHub repository.

Rather than share a comprehensive update on each of the six goals in our strategic plan, we want to draw your attention to a significant milestone in the works: CarpentryConnect South Africa. In our last strategic plan update we shared our commitment to developing and implementing resources and programs to support local leadership and Carpentries advocacy. The planning and implementation of CarpentryConnect South Africa is a major milestone, and gives us space to support the following strategic plan goals:

Goal 2: Intentionally incorporate equity, inclusion, and accessibility to support a diverse community.

Thanks to the generous support from the Code for Science & Society Event Fund, we are able to provide live captioning and translation services to attendees in Kiswahili and isiZulu. Additionally, up to 100 attendees will receive mobile data to attend conference events, like the Data and Library Carpentry workshop, instructor training and networking events.

Goal 6: Advocate for our values and vision to empower more people to work with data and software.

The main goal of CarpentryConnect South Africa is to build capacity for workshops through instructor training, and establish a network for this regional Carpentries community. We are attracting students, researchers, technologists, librarians, and others who find value in working with data and software in an effort to build and scale Carpentries activities in the region. The CarpentryConnect South Africa planning committee has put the CarpentryConnect Kit to good use as they organise this regional, virtual event, and we hope to inspire other regions to work collaboratively to advocate for our vision and values as well.

We cannot wait to celebrate this milestone in September!

For more information about the rest of our milestones for the second quarter of 2021, visit our quarterly team projects page.