CarpentriesOffline — CarpentryCon 2022 feedback and call for help

This blog post was originally published on 12 December on Medium.

In July we published our first blog post to introduce CarpentriesOffline. This will be post number two, a report back of CarpentryCon 2022. We should probably get a name for this series. Any suggestions?

If you are not familiar with CarpentriesOffline — it is a project to create an environment for delivering Carpentries workshops offline using Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers. It could be any computer lying around that you don’t know what to do with, but for starters we are focussing on the RPi.

I (Jannetta) was fortunate enough to be able to attend quite a few sessions at CarpentryCon 2022 and as usual it was quite an experience. The amount of effort that the core team and the CarpentryCon Task Force must have put into organising the conference and make things run so smoothly goes beyond my comprehension. Not only were there sessions in both English and Spanish but we had sub-titles, captions, sign language and repeated sessions to accomodate people from different time zones.

With the help of Colin Sauze and Abhishek Dasgupta, we ran a breakout session, and my lightning talk was presented in three sessions. From the four sessions we were able to get really interesting questions and invaluable feedback from the community. Several people expressed their interest in the project and willingness to contribute in some way or the other. Kari Jordan also asked whether there is any way that the core committee can support us.

With this blogpost I would like to call on all readers who are interested in the project — whether it is just to see what we are up to or whether it is because you would like to help out — to make use of the following resources to get in contact:

1. Our GitHub repository: https://github.com/carpentriesoffline
2. We have a channel in the Carpentries Slack workspace. Just add the #carpentries-offline and start talking to us.

If for any reason you have problems to get into contact with us via the above, then track one of us down in the main Carpentries Slack workspace. It is quite impossible for us to hide!

Some of the things that we need help with are the following:

1. Our website (https://carpentriesoffline.org)
2. Testing our scripts for creating Raspberry Pi images
3. Testing our infrastructure
4. Running pilot offline workshops
5. Help with developing and testing our instructor onboarding workshop
6. Helping with arranging our monthly meetings — taking notes, sending out reminders, setting up the HackMD document, synchronising the HackMD doc to GitHub
7. Anything you think you can help with that I have not mentioned here.

If you are interested, please get involved. Every little contribution would help.