Quarterly Strategic Plan Update: Q3 2021

In January of 2020, The Carpentries published our Strategic Plan for 2020-2025. Written and adopted before the onset of a global pandemic that has reconfigured the way the world operates, this strategic plan has served as a much-needed guidepost for The Carpentries through a period of uncertainty and change. Each quarter, The Carpentries Core Team highlights progress towards completing or fulfilling the strategic plan.

I hope you will be proud of the work we have been able to accomplish in the third quarter of 2021. Our commitment to equity, inclusion and accessibility is strong, and with your help we have improved several workflows and streamlined programs to make it easier for community members to participate and contribute. Read on to learn more, and as always, we invite you to get in touch with us to share any feedback you may have.

Quarterly Updates by Team

For more detailed information about each of the team’s work this quarter and in past quarters, please visit the Core Team Projects Page

Business Team

In Q3, The Business Team has worked with our fiscal sponsor, Community Initiatives, and the Finance Committee of the Executive Council to pursue grant opportunities and explore ways to manage and diversify our revenue streams including:

• A Sponsorship Program that will be piloted for 2021-2022. Organisations can show their financial support of The Carpentries through this program.
• Two grant proposals to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work, community development, and curriculum development.
• A Values Alignment Task Force that developed a set of recommendations for how to identify whether an organisation or service is acting in accordance with The Carpentries Core Values.

Executive Team

In Q3, Thanks to the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The Carpentries Executive Team convened an Equity Council to advise on our goals of bringing more Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people to data and coding. This quarter the Equity Council met to share resources, best practices, and ideas to help improve our programming, assessment, and recruitment approaches. Additionally the Executive Team:

• Engaged Understood For All, a non-profit organisation focused on disability inclusion, to work with us in improving our workflows, processes, and community engagement methods.
• Met with the Executive Council regarding governance, transparency, and decision making. Outcomes from these meetings can be found on our blog in the following posts: On the governance of The Carpentries, Introducing the new Executive Council Standing Committees.

Infrastructure Team

In Q3, the Infrastructure Team worked on the following deliverables:

• Planning work for new features in AMY:
  • Instructors will be able to register their interest in upcoming workshops directly from AMY.
  • Improving how we capture how community members are involved in various aspects of our community to better reflect their engagement with us.
• Reviewing The Carpentries practices and policies to comply with international privacy laws.
• Providing support to the other teams for the implementation of their projects.
• Performing ongoing maintenance of our infrastructure.

Curriculum Team

In Q3, the Curriculum Team continued work on the following:

• Finishing alpha testing of curriculum infrastructure redesign.
• Continuing the Incubator Spotlight series to highlight curriculum development work by community members in the Incubator space - two lessons highlighted (RNA-Seq with Bioconductor and Interactive Data Visualization in Python).
• Onboarding 18 new Maintainers for 14 lessons.
• Reactivating the Curriculum Advisors program.

Workshop Administration Team

In Q3, the Workshop Administration Team:

• Began internal preparation for shifting the Regional Coordinator program to The Carpentries Community Development Team.
• Continued working on the Instructor Selection Project that will automate and streamline how Instructors sign-up to teach Centrally-Organised workshops.
• Launched a survey to gather feedback from Instructors, Workshop Hosts and Member organisations about teaching workshops in person.
• Began Instructor Feedback Taskforce to identify ways to gather feedback from instructors and hosts following a workshop.
• Began Instructor Availability Working Group to identify ways to encourage more instructors to sign up to teach Centrally-Organised workshops.

Instructor Training Team

In Q3, work towards the strategic plan by the Instructor Training Team included:

• Releasing the Instructor Training Report to improve accountability of information.
• Starting work on the Instructor Training Communications Overhaul.
• Continuing work on Curriculum updates including the development of an Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility episode.
• Certifying 14 new Trainers!

Membership Team

In Q3, the Membership Team completed the following:

• Reengaging our current member organisations through council meetings. Planning out intentional quarterly community sessions.
• Revamping the membership workflow to reduce redundancy and create a better member experience.

Community Development Team

In Q3 of 2021, the Community Development Team:

• Supported CarpentryConnect South Africa.
• Onboarded a new Director of Community, Alycia Crall .
• Convened a working group to explore solidifying the Carpentries Trademark and Logo Usage policies.
• Announced CarpentryCon @ Home 2022 and began the search for co-chairs and members of the CarpentryCon Task Force.
• Helped lead a workshop on Culturally Relevant Education in Environmental Data Science (CREEDS) that was hosted on August 10th and 17th. A final report from the event will be available at the end of Q4.