Welcome to the 2022 Trainers Leadership Committee!

In February, the Trainer community held its second annual election for Trainers Leadership, a Committee intended to provide governance and development support to our growing subcommunity of amazing people who teach Instructor Training.

In their first year as an elected body, Trainers Leadership made great strides towards establishing their role and improving the support structures for the Trainer community. These included:

• Establishing meeting procedures, adopting a variation on Martha’s Rules, identifying ways to use public and private channels to prioritize transparency, and creating GitHub templates and other structures to facilitate future work.
• Reviewing and planning a replacement for the (former) Trainer Agreement. A new proposal for a Certification Renewal Process for Trainers was presented to the full community and ratified during the election in February.
• Detailing governance and management structure for relevant processes, including oversight of Instructor checkout, Instructor Training curriculum maintenance, and the process of scheduling Trainer community meetings.
• Overseeing a major update to the Instructor Training Curriculum
• Defining a decision-making partnership with the Trainer community. Conversations so far suggest that Leadership is trusted and expected to take responsibility for action, reserving community consultation for focused, impactful choices.
• Seeking and receiving approval from The Carpentries Executive Council as a formal Committee! This took time because this group has a governance role, making it different from other Committees, and there were not yet any guidelines for that aspect of their role. Trainers Leadership will continue to report to the EC as a Committee, but they can also now look to the new Lesson Program Governance policies where applicable.

As part of their commitment to transparency, details on these and other accomplishments of this productive group are available in the reports and issues sections on the Trainers repository!

Our 2022 Trainers Leadership panel is:

Mark Crowe (Chair)

Mark Crowe is the Skills Development Manager for QCIF in Queensland, Australia, where he manages a team of research computing support professionals who offer training, coaching, and advice to researchers from all seven Queensland universities. He is a recent but enthusiastic convert to the Carpentries, first learning about it less than three years ago, and is working to encourage the further adoption of Carpentries approaches throughout Australia and the surrounding regions.

Jeff Oliver (Secretary)

Jeff Oliver is the Data Science Specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries, where he advocates and agitates for data and computational literacy. When he isn’t consulting on the R programming language or trying to teach Python, he occasionally sullies his fingers with phylo- and ecoinformatic analyses. He is most looking forward to facilitating more and varied opportunities for Carpentries Instructor Training, while being respectful of the volunteer Trainers’ time.

Bonny Adane Bayissa

I am founder and coordinator for R-Ladies Addis Ababa (An organization that works on Data and Digital literacy for researchers); a civil engineer, an interior designer and lecturer living in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. I took carpentries training before starting my professional career and decided I want to volunteer my time in the digital and data literacy movement. The carpentries have helped me in widening my perspective in Teaching and learning process. And I plan to help in maintaining and broadening an engaging and inclusive environment for trainers.

Paola Corrales

Paola is a Ph.D. student at the University of Buenos Aires. She is part of the latinamerican community where she has contributed to translations projects of Carpentries’ materials and organize Instructor Training events in Spanish. She is a professor at the Data Sciences degree and postgraduate courses at Guillermo Brown University. She also develops openly licensed materials to teach and learn R and other tools. She is excited to be part of the leadership teams and to bring a different perspective. She looks forward to hearing from other trainers about their experience and how to keep growing the community.

Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rhode Island, located in a small beach town in the northeast United States. Sarah’s lab works on system level interventions for fairer machine learning powered AI by understanding the problems in collaboration with social scientists, analyzing ML algorithms and designing novel algorithms. Sarah’s goal for the trainer leadership this term is to increase communication within the trainer community and ensure the new trainer certification renewal process works well.