The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee

The Carpentries is dedicated to developing and empowering a diverse community of enthusiasts around computational methods for research and data science. To facilitate this, The Carpentries has established a Code of Conduct that governs behaviour within the community. The Code of Conduct committee was established to enforce the Code, and to manage any changes and updates to it.

Our Goal:
To maintain, update and enforce The Carpentries Code of Conduct (CoC).

Our Approach:
We do this by conducting meetings where we review current CoC issues. If a CoC violation is reported to us, we process that by following the Enforcement Manual.

Our Structure:
We have meetings as needed, and we have a private email list where Code of Conduct issues are discussed. We also have a private GitHub repo for internal discussion and organisation.

Our Leadership:
The structure of the committee is such that a community member is the Chair of the Committee. In addition, a staff member of The Carpentries is part of the committee as a staff liaison, and a member of the Executive Council (EC) is part of the committee as an EC liaison.

Contacting the Committee:
Please email your concerns to coc@carpentries.org. All correspondence will be treated in confidence.

Our Governance Structure: Please see the Code of Conduct Committee (CoCc) Governance document to find details on membership, onboarding, administration, positions, roles, and responsibilities.

Current Committee Members

Chair

D. Sarah Stamps is an Associate Professor of Geophysics at Virginia Tech in the Department of Geosciences. She runs the Geodesy and Tectonophysics Laboratory, which is a research group that conducts research that entails measuring the Earth’s surface motions with millimeter precision and using computational modeling to understand the physical processes driving the Earth’s volcanoes, earthquakes, and continental deformation while training future leaders that are culturally effective. She is the current chair of the CoC committee.

CoC Liaisons

Core Team Liaison: Alycia Crall is the Director of Community for The Carpentries, and serves as the core team liaison to the CoC Committee.

Executive Council Liaison: Annajiat Alim Rasel is a Sr. Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering under the School of Data and Sciences (SDS), Brac University, Bangladesh. He teaches problem-solving skills using Java and Python while trying to explore the exciting fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Parallel, Distributed, and High-Performance Computing (HPC). He hopes to build a Carpentries community in Bangladesh while promoting diversity; enhancing awareness for FAIR and CARE principles; and working on localization and accessibility in technology. Annajiat joined The Carpentries Executive Council in 2022 and serves as the Liaison to CoC Committee.

Volunteer Members

Andrea Sánchez-Tapia is a biologist with a background in biodiversity informatics and a certified Carpentries Instructor since 2021. She has been part of Open Source communities of practice since 2017. She believes creating safe and inclusive spaces is necessary for the practice of open and responsible research.

Karin Lagesen is a bioinformatician working at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute. Her time is spent building pipelines, teaching people how to analyze their data, and finding new and better ways of using bioinformatics for microbial surveillance. She was the chair of the CoC committee for 2 years, member of the Software Carpentry Steering Committee for three years, and is also an instructor trainer. Karin is part of this committee because she believes it is very important to ensure that The Carpentries is a safe and welcoming.

Lora Leligdon is the Head of Research Data Services at Dartmouth Library, in Hanover, NH, USA. She is also a co-founder of the New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium (NESCLiC), an alliance of academic institutions in the northeastern US that joined the Carpentries together to create a community of practice to promote reproducible research and open science across our campuses.

Malvika Sharan is a co-lead of The Turing Way project and a Senior Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, UK. She co-founded and is a co-director of OLS (previously Open Life Science). She became a Trainer with The Carpentries in 2015 while carrying out her Ph.D. research in bioinformatics. She hosted and taught at multiple instructor training, software and data workshops in Europe, and internationally. She co-chaired the first CarpentryCon that took place in Dublin in 2018. Her previous involvements in The Carpentries community include her participation in the mentoring program, instructor discussions and CarpentryCon+Connect Taskforce. Her motivation for participating in The Carpentries CoC stems from her passion for promoting inclusiveness and accessibility in open research. She has been in the CoC committee since 2018, and chaired the committee between 2021-2023.

Yo Yehudi is the Executive Director and co-founder of Open Life Science, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, NASA TOPS Training module lead, and EngD. student at the University of Manchester studying pathogen-related data sharing and sustainability of open source software. Previous roles include editor for the PLOS Open Source Toolkit, Codefirst:Girls coding instructor, Mozilla volunteer, editor emeritus for the Journal of Open Source Software, board member of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, and software developer at working on an open source biological data warehouse called InterMine, based at the University of Cambridge.

Areas of responsibility:

1. Incident Response Leads: Facilitate report handling, identify chairs and Incident response group, ensure the publication of transparency reports quarterly - D. Sarah Stamps and Lora Leligdon
2. Training Leads: as part of regular business meetings - scenario curation, training/reading material accumulation, CoC facilitators program - Karin Lagesen and Yo Yehudi
3. Onboarding and discussion Leads: Onboarding/offboarding and discussion on topics that come up in incident response or other interactions such as communication and cultural diversity situations: Andrea Sánchez Tapia and Malvika Sharan