Quarterly Team Projects in The Carpentries

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Kari L. Jordan

Privacy Policy

In Q4 2021, the Executive Team finalized the updates to our Privacy Policy which were released in January 2022. The new version of our Privacy Policy follows a more standard structure and spells out your rights and how to exercise them under European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Customer Privacy Act (CCPA). It also includes the legal basis we use to process your personal information. Additionally, the Executive Team led our Core Team’s performance review process, whereby Core Team members provided feedback via self and peer evaluations.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Kari L. Jordan

Equity Council

Thanks to the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The Carpentries has 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.

We engaged Understood For All, a non-profit organization focused on disability inclusion, to work with us in improving our workflows, processes, and community engagement methods. Understood will be evaluating our hiring processes and our online workshop experience and providing recommendations for improvement. They are also providing training for our Core Team.

Additionally, the Executive Team had several meetings 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.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Kari L. Jordan

Privacy Law Compliance

The Carpentries Executive Team is continuing to put into place the systems and processes that will ensure our compliance with Privacy Laws with the following efforts:

• Completed the account inventory and developed a system to audit ownership of the files hosted in The Carpentries’s Google Drive.
• Added features to AMY that will allow users to archive their profile when they become inactive with us and remind them to update their personal information.
• Currently developing an interface to make it easier to audit when users provide their consent and revoke them. We are also developing internal documentation and workflows for DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment) to be used across our projects and teams.

The Executive Council worked extensively to clarify its roles and responsibilities as it relates to the governance of the organization. Learn more in their recently published blog post.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Kari L. Jordan

New Core Team Member Recruitment

In Q4 2020, The Carpentries Executive Team oversaw the recruitment of two new members of our Core Team, as well as three short-term positions. We hope to be able to announce new team members to the community near the end of Q1 2021.

This quarter, the Executive Team has also helped to coordinate a cross-team effort to solidify our support of online workshops and integrate online offerings into all of our workflows and structures. You can read about this project in this blog post from December 14, 2020.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Kari L. Jordan

Learner Survey Infographics

We collect information from our learners via the pre and post workshop survey. Additionally, we collected long-term impact survey responses in Q4 of 2020. We’ve released several reports using this data, however this year we will only create infographics with the data. This is because the results of our reports often say the same thing. In the future we may write a more comprehensive impact paper, but infographics that our team and community can use will be sufficient for this quarter.

The Carpentries Annual Report, 2019

In late 2018, we released our first Annual Report (for 2018). This report has served as a valuable resource for communicating with both existing community members, as well as potential funders, Members, and others who we want to establish a relationship with. In Q1 2020, will develop 2019’s annual report that both communicates updated metrics for our programs and financials, and also showcases the strengths of our organisation and how it has grown over the past year.

Erin Becker · Elizabeth Williams · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

Planning for Implementing CoCc Task Force Recommendations

A task force met four times during August and September 2019 to make recommendations to help respond to incidents that happen outside the existing mandate of the Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee. These recommendations were released on 2019-09. This quarter we will develop a roadmap that can be used to implement the task force’s recommendations.

Erin Becker · Elizabeth Williams · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

Recommendations for incidents outside the mandate of The Carpentries Code of Conduct committee

With a growing community and an increasing number of Carpentries spaces (online and in-person), The Carpentries is encountering cases where a response to incidents either in or outside of Carpentries spaces may be appropriate, but are outside our formal guidelines and processes. Our Code of Conduct (CoC) and Code of Conduct Committee are now quite mature and in operation for incidents that fall within its mandate. There is less clarity when there are incidents outside the Code of Conduct committee’s current purview, including incidents that may have occurred outside of Carpentries spaces, incidents that happen within Carpentries spaces that are either not reported or are not yet incidents, or where people would like to share information or get feedback, rather than formally report an incident. These incidents may impact the ability of members to feel safe working in our community. We want to respond to these events in a timely manner and in a consistent way that balances transparency, confidentiality and legal considerations.

Erin Becker · Elizabeth Williams · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Roadmap

We currently employ a reactive approach to issues around equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Each process and program we as a team own - from how we collect information to how we support micro-communities - should include elements of a strategic plan that ensures we are advocating for community:

Equity: The creation of opportunities for equal access to and participation in programs that are capable of closing participation gaps in our community.
Inclusion: The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement of diverse people and communities that increases awareness, content knowledge, and empathic understanding of the ways we interact within (and change) our community.
Accessibility: Program/process design and implementation that offers multiple avenues for access and participation.

This project is being scoped to develop a strategic plan that will include our:

• Strategy: Scoping the larger vision for why we are doing this work.
• Plan: List of steps to accomplish the goals of our strategy.

Erin Becker · Elizabeth Williams · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

Develop a System to Evaluate and Measure Project/Program Outcomes

Each staff team project will need sign-off from the Assessment and Equity and Inclusion Lead (Kari). We currently do not have a system to define what assessment/E&I looks like across projects and programmatic outcomes. The purpose of this project is to develop such a system in the form of a rubric and/or checklist.

Kari L. Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Fundraising Campaign

In Q4 2021, the Business Team collaborated both internally and externally on three major projects: The Carpentries’ first Sponsorship Program, our Fundraising Campaign, and the Values Alignment Taskforce.

We are piloting a sponsorship program through 2022 to support The Carpentries’ mission and vision. Potential sponsors will receive incentives like recognition on The Carpentries website, a digital supporter badge, and mention in The Carpentries newsletter.

Our 2021 Fundraising Campaign ran from November 2 - to December 31, 2021. We asked The Carpentries community to support us by either donating to the fundraising campaign or sharing the fundraising link with their network. We ran the fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $5,000 in individual donations, and we met that goal with a final tally of $5,535. Thank you all for sharing, donating, and otherwise assisting with our work towards our mission.

The Values Alignment Taskforce’s objective was to outline a set of recommendations that would be used to develop a due diligence process for how to identify whether an organisation or service is acting in accordance with The Carpentries Core Values. The full set of recommendations are linked on our blog.

Kari L. Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Sponsorship Program and more

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. We developed a Sponsorship Program that will be piloted for 2021-2022 whereby like minded organisations can show their financial support of The Carpentries while supporting our mission and vision.

We submitted 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. Additionally, we led a Values Alignment Task Force that developed a set of recommendations on how to identify whether an organisation or service is acting in accordance with The Carpentries Core Values.

These recommendations are to be used as checkpoints for existing relationships and service providers to verify that The Carpentries can safely enter into new relationships with organisations in the future. All of these activities are in support of strategic plan goal #5: Strengthen organisational structure and capacity to be strategic and responsive.

Kari L. Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Capacity Building

Goal 5 in the Carpentries strategic plan is to Strengthen organisational structure and capacity to be strategic and responsive. Under this goal is the following objective: Be aware of and implement best practices in privacy management, copyright, and trademarks.

In the second quarter of the year The Carpentries Business Team has made progress on transferring and registering trademarks for the organisation. They have transferred previously registered Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry trademark registrations to our current fiscal sponsor Community Initiatives. Additionally, They have submitted an application to begin trademarking The Carpentries name and logo.

Kari L. Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy · Omar Khan

Capacity Building

Throughout Q2 and Q3 2020, The Business Team has been working with the Executive Council on Capacity Building. This work is driven by Goal 5 of The Carpentries Strategic Plan: Strengthen organisational structure and capacity to be strategic and responsive. In alignment with Goal 5, the goal of the Capacity Building project was to pursue grant opportunities and explore ways to manage and diversify our revenue streams, including pursuing corporate sponsorships, that are aligned with our values and priorities.

We began by exploring the revenue applications of The Carpentries current assets and organisational strengths. We researched fundraising strategies and took advantage of fundraising training opportunities offered to Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grantees. The information from these initiatives was used to support the development of a fundraising plan. As part of this project, we worked very closely with our Communications Manager, Omar Khan, who led the development of The Carpentries Philanthropy. A newly launched mailing list for members of our community who are interested in learning more about how they can help support our mission of building global capacity in essential data and computational skills and broaden The Carpentries’ impact on the world around us. For more information, please view the blog post: Announcing The Carpentries Philanthropy: A New Way to Get Involved with The Carpentries (2020-10-01)

Our work in this project demonstrated the importance of fundraising through donation campaigns for non-profit organisations. Therefore as outlined in the fundraising plan, we began planning a donation campaign. On 2020-11-09, the blog post A Call to Action: Donate to The Carpentries went out to announce and launch our first donation campaign.

Kari L. Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Online Workshops Pricing Model

In Q2 2020, The Business Team was tasked with determining whether the pricing model for online workshops would differ from in-person workshops. To do this, we researched the costs of licensing expansions of existing tools. We reviewed the subscription services that we use for any tools required to host workshops. Those tools include Zoom, Calendly, and HelpScout. We looked at what our current plans include in terms of users and what it would cost to upgrade plans should we need to for online workshops. We were able to apply for several non-profit discounts and remove users who were not using the services in their work. Because of that, we did not need to increase the price for subscriptions for our services, and therefore did not need to increase the price for workshops taught online.

Kari L. Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

2019 Financial Report

December 2019 marked the end of our 2019 fiscal year, the launch of a new strategic plan and transitions within both our Executive Council and Executive Team. Our annual financial report will outline the financial trends over the last year, our financial status at the end of the year, and provide an outlook going into 2020. Through this report, we hope to provide The Carpentries leadership (EC & Executive Team) the resources to make informed strategic financial decisions to support The Carpentries’ programs and to allow the broader community easy access to more detailed financial information.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

Grants to Support Program Development and Scaling

In November 2019, we announced that we have been awarded USD $2.65 million from Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support our work over the next three years. This funding will support the growth of our Instructor Training program and Trainer Training programs, enable the creation of a platform for community members to share high-quality, peer-reviewed lesson materials (Carpentries Lab), move forward on our Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Roadmap, more systematically support local community growth and leadership, and much more! For more information about the work these grants are supporting, see our announcement. Also check out our Supporters page for more details on funding sources.

Growing our Core Team

At the end of Q3 2019, we bid a bittersweet farewell to Chris Erdmann as he moved on from his role as Library Carpentry Community & Development Director. This quarter, we brought on-board Angelique Trusler as Regional Consultant for Southern Africa and announced four new open positions with our team. We also announced that our Executive Director, Tracy Teal, will be moving on from her position in January. We are grateful for Tracy’s transformative leadership and for Chris’s contributions to building the Library Carpentry community. In the new year, we look forward to finding our five new Core Team members. Will you be one of them?

Preparing to Report on our Programs

In 2018, we released our first annual report as The Carpentries. We have also released reports on our programmatic statistics, and our impact on learners, both immediately after workshops and longer-term. We also shared a high-level overview of our financials in this blog post. It is important to us as an organisation, and in line with our community value of “Acting Openly”, to systematise our reporting process and make this information routinely available to the community in ways that are accessible and actionable. This quarter, we began to organise and clean our data to prepare for a Q1 2020 release of our 2019 Annual Report and financial report, as well as a report on our Instructor Training program, and a set of infographics around our impact on learners at our workshops. Watch our blog and @thecarpentries on Twitter for announcements as these reports are released!

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

Financial Report, Budget Development and Tracking

In Q2, we generated a Financial Report for fiscal year 2018. This report presents an overview of our income and expenses and serves as a resource to support our long-term financial sustainability. In order to sustain the financial health of The Carpentries as we grow and diversify, we have developed a quarterly budget creation and tracking system. This will allow us, as a community, to consider the financial impact of strategic decisions as we think about priorities and activities.

In Q3 the Business Team has continued this work in cooperation with the Carpentries Executive Council Treasurer, Raniere Silva. We have created a Quarterly Budget format and workflow and will be working on integrating this into a Yearly Budget format and workflow for 2020.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

This quarter (Q2 2019), the Business team focused on tracking and reporting our financial status and diversifying our income sources. In Q1 2019, we started organising and analysing the financial data we have for the year 2018, and we have now presented it as a report to the Executive Council, to give them a clear idea of our current financial trends and help them to make informed strategic decisions. Similarly, we will be developing a workflow to generate and track quarterly and yearly budgets. As our community grows and diversifies, so must our business practices, and developing a system for monitoring income and expenses will help us sustain financial health.

Based on information from 2018 on the growth of our activities, we will also be exploring individual donations and sponsorships as additional models for financial support. We currently have a donation button on our website, leading to a donation page that has been out of date and lacking in engagement. This page will be updated, so that donors have a clear understanding of the impact their donation will have. A Sponsorship Model Task Force will be assembled to explore a model for sponsorship with the community. We see a sponsorship model that invites sponsors to share the vision of our organisation as having potential for stable funding and partnerships.

Donate Button

As we work to diversify our revenue sources, we have made it easier for individuals to contribute financially to The Carpentries by updated the aesthetics and information on donations page. Our websites and lesson pages experience high traffic volumes (the Data Carpentry R Ecology lesson receives more than 15,000 unique visitors per month!), so we wanted to offer those users an opportunity to donate to support our work by making the system easier to use and giving donors a clear idea of what their donations will serve.

Sponsorship Model Task Force

In Q2, we assembled a Sponsorship Model Task Force to explore a model for sponsorship with the community. We see high potential for stable funding and partnership-building by developing a sponsorship model that invites mission-aligned organizations to share and support the vision of our organisation. This task force has begun to meet and outline work for piloting a sponsorship model in time for CarpentryCon 2020.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

In Q1 2019, the business Team worked on updating our grants collaboration workflow and producing a 2018 Annual Financial Report to support the Executive Council in strategic planning.

Alycia Crall · Angelique Trusler · Kelly Barnes · Omar Khan · Toby Hodges

In Q4, the Community Development Team supported the following activities:

• Registered with the annual Hacktoberfest event to support new contributions to Glosario, our open source glossary of data science terms
• Identified and onboarded Task Force Co-Chairs who will lead planning for CarpentryCon 2022.
• Conducted interviews with subcommunity members to inform development of the new Community Development Program.
• Supported working groups with faculty from Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) engaged in data science education at their institutions as part of a grant funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #2135830)
• Began development of a comprehensive assessment strategy for all activities of the Community Development Team
• Supported the transition of the Instructor Development Committee from the Community Development Team to the Workshop Administration Team

Alycia Crall · Angelique Trusler · Kelly Barnes · Omar Khan · Toby Hodges

CarpentryConnect South Africa, New Director of Community and More

In Q3 of 2021, The Community Development team supported CarpentryConnect South Africa. Additionally, a new Director of Community, Alycia Crall, was onboarded. They also convened a working group to explore solidifying the Carpentries Trademark and Logo Usage policies. CarpentryCon @ Home 2022 was also announced and the search for co-chairs and members of a task force for it began.

Angelique Trusler · Kelly Barnes · Omar Khan · Serah Njambi Kiburu · Toby Hodges

In Q2 2021,

• Kelly completed work on, and released the Internal Instructor Training Report for the attention of The Carpentries Core Team and Executive Council,
• Omar worked on the Financial and Annual Reports for the year 2020 in collaboration with the Business Team and the Executive Team,
• Angelique continued to prepare for CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021, focussing on organising committee coordination, volunteer recruitment, developing outreach material, and managing the event budget,
• Serah Njambi Kiburu developed the CarpentryConnect ZA 2021 website in an iterative process that incorporated feedback from the organising committee,
• Kelly designed and facilitated three skill-up sessions on the Community Development Team about Universal Design,
• Omar developed a workflow to guide the Carpentries Core Team in delivering urgent communications,
• Angelique continued to steer Instructor Training and instructor checkout efforts in South Africa by hosting two trainings in Q2 2021,
• Angelique increased the Glosario African language offering to 5 languages (i.e Afrikaans, Kiswahili, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Setswana ). Looking actively for opportunities to recruit volunteer translators.
• Serah completed work on the Code of Conduct Facilitators training resource, incorporating feedback from the Code of Conduct committee and Carpentries Core Team, and shared it with the community for review and feedback,
• Angelique continued to support the African Carpentries Monthly meetups and facilitated monthly skill-up sessions whose details can be found in the ZA community Etherpad.
• Kelly successfully recruited and began training a cohort of 14 new Trainers
• Serah successfully co-organised and held csv,conf,v6,
• Serah worked with Samar Elsheikh and Katherine Simeon from the Instructor Development Committee to host a Mentoring Groups showcase,
• Serah worked with Carol Fadeke from the Instructor Development Committee to onboard 17 new discussion hosts,
• Serah shared from her experience in co-organising online events with the Disruptive Labs community,
• Serah facilitated the first FORCE11/REPO working group Fireside Chat with FSCI’s Martin Brennan
• Serah hang her boots as Director of Community Development and Engagement, and lead of the Community Development Team.

Angelique Trusler · Kelly Barnes · Omar Khan · Serah Njambi Kiburu · Toby Hodges

In Q1 2021,

• Led by Angelique Trusler, planning work around CarpentryConnect South Africa began. CarpentryConnects are local and regional community events, organised to bring together community members of The Carpentries that are in close proximity geographically for knowledge exchange, collaboration, and networking. CarpentryConnect South Africa is funded by Code for Science and Society’s Event Fund.
• Omar and Angelique prepared communications resources to support outreach efforts for The Carpentries Membership program,
• Serah and Toby facilitated a workshop on Community Sustainability for Research Software Engineers in the SORSE community. The session recording is available on YouTube, and here is a summary blog post from the discussion on community sustainability.
• Serah worked on a first draft of the Code of Conduct facilitators module. The Code of Conduct facilitation module of the Community Facilitators Program hopes to prepare community members to bridge between community members at events and our Code of Conduct processes. The resource draft is currently being reviewed by Core Team and the Code of Conduct committee. Once ready, the module will be published here on GitHub in May 2021.
• Serah gave a talk and developed a checklist on prioritising accessibility in online events at a session targeted at Code for Science and Society’s Event Fund grantees. Here’s a blog post summarising nuggets from the talk, and detailing the checklist https://carpentries.org/blog/2021/02/prioritising-accessibility-virtual-events/
• Serah prepared guidelines to empower our community to collectively improve accessibility of resources in The Carpentries - https://carpentries.org/blog/2021/02/improving-accessibility-across-carpentries-resources/
• At our Core Team Virtual Retreat in March 2021
  • Omar led a Brand Identity workshop with the goal to give the team a shared understanding of the work and process around developing an organisation’s brand
  • Angelique led a session in resilience that included activities encouraging positive adjustment to challenging life circumstances. The session was based on the intervention strategy entitled “Khazimula!” which originated from the Pathways to Resilience project that took place in South Africa from 2009 to 2014.
  • Serah and Toby led a two-hour workshop at The Carpentries Core Team retreat in March 2021. The goal of the session was two-fold:
    1. to give an orientation on the different sub-communities in The Carpentries, and expound on how they interact to support our programming as an organisation, and 
    2. to create a shared understanding of our role as Core Team in informing and enabling community efforts in a volunteer/community-led organisation.

Angelique Trusler · Kelly Barnes · Omar Khan · Serah Njambi Kiburu · Toby Hodges

In Q4, the Community Development Team

• worked with Toby Hodges and Zhian Kamvar to prepare a video presentation aimed at introducing SORSE community members to The Carpentries.
• prepared a ten minute presentation for Open Education 2020 about The Carpentries Instructor Training Program
• published Community Facilitators Program content around Feedback Facilitation publicly on GitHub, onboarded and formally introduced our first cohort of Community Facilitators in The Carpentries focusing on feedback facilitation
• updated our community communications guides to include guidelines and best practices for sharing job posts in The Carpentries, and took on Jez Cope’s suggestion and created an opportunities mailing list on TopicBox.
• supported the Instructor Development Committee Leaders in launching and announcing the first cycle of Carpentries Mentoring Groups for 2021, and in holding an information session for community members that expressed interest in the Mentoring groups
• continued work on the semi-permanent Online Workshops Pilot, and organised a blog post centred around communicating the core team’s work involving the Online Workshops Pilot.

Angelique Trusler · Kari L. Jordan · Kelly Barnes · Omar Khan · Serah Njambi Kiburu · Toby Hodges

In Q3, the Community Development Team

• continued to support the online workshops pilot project by (i)soliciting for feedback about instructor and learner experiences in online workshops, (ii)drafting, editing and publishing community posts on the subject of online workshops and collating these community contributions in The Carpentries Handbook for ease of access, and (iii)presenting prominently occurring questions and tips for addition to our formal Carpentries recommendations around running online workshops. We also spent time engaging our community on the question of accessibility of Carpentries resources and tools to community members in different settings around the world.
• worked with the Task Force and community members to facilitate sessions at CarpentryCon 2020, ensure smooth running of the five-week virtual event, oversaw the creation and maintenance of the conference website, and kept the event playlist on YouTube updated with session recordings.
• worked with Lou Woodley from CSCCE.org to write the first module of the Community Facilitators module around Feedback Facilitation, introduced the program to our global community and put out a call for community members to apply to participate in the pilot feedback facilitation cohort.
• reopened our Instructor Development Committee Leadership program after a six month hiatus in the early days of the pandemic, and invited community members to apply to serve in the 2020-2021 cohort of IDC Leaders. We were able to onboard seven IDC Leaders in Q3 and you can read more about the IDC Leaders in this blog post.

Online Workshops Pilot Project work

In Q2 2020, the Community Development Team collaborated with other Carpentries teams on the Online Workshops Pilot project. Our mandate on this project was to:

• Identify ways community members can be supported through a tough period, and communicate extensively about this
• Create a central page on the website to share The Carpentries official recommendations around online workshops
• Create a central resource in our Handbook to collate all community-contributed resources relevant for teaching and learning in online workshops support community members in drafting and publishing blog posts about online workshops
• Triage community questions and suggestions for the attention and action of the rest of our team
• Organise Themed Discussions to facilitate brainstorming and knowledge sharing on matters relevant to online workshops
• Facilitating sessions at CarpentryCon to enable instructors to share their experiences from teaching online
• Find opportunities for Carpentries Core Team and community members to present and share strategies for teaching online
• Define facilitation roles necessary for successful convening in online spaces and design guides for them. These are part of the CarpentryConnect Planning Kit, a resource designed to guide community members as they organise local and regional Carpentries events, whether online or in-person. Herein you will find checklists to work with, recommendations for best practices and resources on event planning for further reading.

Community Facilitators Program

Developing the Roadmap for this project was the first of multiple phases toward the creation and launch of the Community Facilitators Program in The Carpentries, and you can read about this at length under this issue. In Q2 2020, we were able to

• Identify all modules that will constitute the curriculum developed to support community facilitators
• Develop a dependency map to show how the Community Facilitators Program supports existing initiatives in The Carpentries community and to help introduce the Community Facilitators Program to our community to create a shared understanding and help recruit community members to future cohorts of the program
• Identify learning objectives for the first module of the Community Facilitators Program
• Identify the first module of the Community facilitators Program to develop
• Determine team composition & roles in the development of curriculum to train Community Facilitators, including licensing and branding
• Create a Community Facilitators lifecycle summary to guide communication about, onboarding to, and offboarding from the Community Facilitator program

More information about this will be available on The Carpentries blog in the next few weeks.

CarpentryCon @ Home Planning

We worked with Sher! Hurt and the CarpentryCon @ Home Task Force to plan for our first ever online and seven-week community conference. Here is the conference schedule and you can find session recordings on our YouTube channel.

Developing a CarpentryConnect Planning Kit

Serah Njambi Kiburu

CarpentryConnects are community convenings, organised to bring together community members of The Carpentries that are in close proximity geographically for knowledge exchange, collaboration and networking. In Q1 2020, we prioritised the development of the CarpentryConnect Planning Kit, a resource designed to guide community members as they organise local and regional Carpentries events, whether online or in-person. This blog post provides context for the work we did, and summarises ways community members can contribute to the resource.

Carpentries in Africa Community

Angelique Trusler

In Q1 2020, we assessed the communications platforms that were available to the Carpentries Community in Africa. Two additional platforms (i.e. African Carpentries Calendar and Slack Channel) were added to align with that of the rest of Global Carpentries Community. These platforms were updated with among others, general Carpentries announcements (i.e. uniquely African topics, Carpentries Blog posts), funding and scholarship and upcoming Carpentries teaching opportunities. Three successful African Carpentry meet-up sessions were hosted in Q1, attended by Carpentry Community members, Instructors and Trainers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria (with the odd audience from Europe and the United States). We are currently gathering information from the African Carpentries Community on what they want an African Carpentries Meetup 2020 to look like.

Hiring and Onboarding New Communications Manager

Kari L. Jordan · Omar Khan · Serah Njambi Kiburu

In mid-March 2020, Omar Khan joined The Carpentries as communications manager. Read more about him and what his role in The Carpentries will entail here.

Serah Njambi Kiburu · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

The Carpentries Tagathon

In July, we systematised our tagging system on The Carpentries blog to improve the discoverability of our nearly 200 blog posts. Based on feedback from community members, in October, we extended this tagging system to the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry blogs through a Hacktoberfest Tagathon. With fourteen years of posts on the Software Carpentry blog, updating tags is a work-in-progress. We welcome your contributions to re-tagging our old posts at any time!

Expressing Gratitude To and From Our Community

Throughout the month of December, we are practicing our community values of “Valuing All Contributions” and “Community Collaboration” through our Gratitudes Series. We extend heartfelt thanks to all of the individuals, committee and task force members, and all others who support The Carpentries mission. Read all of the messages of gratitude so far and watch the green-stickies tag on our blog for upcoming posts. If your task force or committee isn’t listed yet, and would like to add your message of gratitude, get in touch with us at team@carpentries.org.

Planning for CarpentryCon 2020

In 2018 we held our first global Carpentries conference - CarpentryCon 2018 in Dublin, Ireland. Our community has also organised smaller, regional gatherings at CarpentryConnect Davis, CarpentryConnect Johannesburg and CarpentryConnect Manchester 1 2. The CarpentryCon Task Force is now deep in preparations for CarpentryCon 2020 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA and preparation has already begun for CarpentryCon 2021 in South Africa. The 2020 Task Force is currently accepting applications for financial aid](https://carpentries.org/blog/2019/12/carpentrycon-financial-aid/) and session proposals. For more information and important dates, head over to the CarpentryCon 2020 website.

Carpentries Values

Shared values and goals have long been the starting point of communities of practice as they identify changes they want to see and start working together towards these changes. Between July and November 2019, The Carpentries Community Development Team formed a Task Force which worked with our community to identify and articulate The Carpentries Values. A report about The Carpentries Values Task Force can be found here.

Serah Njambi Kiburu · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

Communications Strategy and Implementation Plan

As you may remember, we developed our community communications strategy in Q1, an exercise that allowed us to define our goals around use of our communications platforms, outline the audiences we communicate to, and integrate inclusivity practices for all communications on The Carpentries channels. We then started implementing it across our platforms and resources in Q2 and have continued with this implementation work in Q3. One of our primary goals for this year is to empower our community members to document and share their knowledge and experiences on our community blog, YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/thecarpentries) and other community spaces. Our communications “how-to” guides in our handbook are one primary tool we are currently using to achieve this, so have a read and let us know what other guides you would like The Carpentries team to make available for you.

The Carpentries Values

As our community coalesces into a shared identity as “The Carpentries”, defining our core values is a priority. Our community values shape everything from the ways that we communicate, to the work that we take on, to the funding opportunities we pursue. Feedback from our community members has been, and will continue to be, vital in articulating these values. We are looking forward to continuing these conversations and formulating these values with our community in Q4 and beyond. For everyone who has interacted / collaborated with members of The Carpentries community in workshops, conferences or across different initiatives, take a few minutes to answer three questions via GitHub, our community Discussion channel or anonymously via this Google Form.

Serah Njambi Kiburu · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

In the first quarter of 2019, we assessed all of The Carpentries communications channels, requested for input from the broader Carpentries community, and developed a communications strategy to help define how and why we communicate as a team at The Carpentries. The strategy includes measures to create awareness about the work that we do, encourage participation and collaboration, and empower and edify our community. But we are also convinced that a strategy is not sufficient in and of itself. Implementation is an important subsequent step.

While implementing the strategy is a continuous task that we hope to carve out into all aspects of our communication over time, in Q2 2019, the Community Development team is test driving the new strategy by:

1. reviewing, refining and standardising content in existing community-facing resources on our website, in our Handbook, YouTube channel and other persistent sources that our community references regularly.
2. working with other staff teams to incorporate the communications strategy into their regular and quarterly project work i.e. by identifying specific audiences that each project is geared at, we can identify channels where these communities thrive, and ways to engage them meaningfully over time
3. being more present and active in environments our community meets and collaborates in so we can learn from you, and understand how to help initiate new collaborations, rally others to participate in ongoing ones and sustain existing ones as community needs evolve over time. For example,
1. we hosted Community Discussions on 21-22 May (view recording) and learnt so much from you on paths to consider as we work on our Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Roadmap.
2. From our monthly Carpentries Instructors in Africa call, community members were really drawn to Bianca’s and Katrin’s creative ideas for teaching R workshops, and they agreed to collaborate on this informative blog post - Tips and Tricks for Teaching R. We are keen to receive more posts by the community for The Carpentries blog, and anyone interested in submitting a draft can fill out this form or send it to Serah Njambi Kiburu directly.
3. we were at CSV Conference in early May 2019 and met lots of researchers, librarians and technologists there, some of whom will be facilitating our themed community discussions, also known as Carpentries Conversations, in the coming months. Look out for that. We’re also very excited to be attending CarpentryConnect in Manchester in June 2019, and Serah Njambi Kiburu will co-chair the Open Source communities track at SciPy 2019 in Austin, Texas in July 2019. We look forward to meeting some of our community in person at these events!

Serah Njambi Kiburu · Kari L. Jordan · Tracy Teal

In Q1 2019, the Community Development Team worked on developing a communications strategy and updating our Code of Conduct documentation with the Code of Conduct Committee.

Erin Becker · Michael Culshaw-Maurer · François Michonneau · Zhian Kamvar · Toby Hodges

In Q4 2021, The Curriculum Team worked on the following tasks in The Carpentries Strategic Plan:

• Prepared the ground for a defined retirement process for Maintainers: a single-question opt-in survey for Maintainers to tell us if they wish to remain active on their lesson. The information gathered will help us better identify which lessons are in need of new Maintainers, and assess the overall health of the Maintainer community. This survey has since been sent out to Maintainers.
• Received a new, more accessible template for our lessons, and began incorporating that into The Carpentries Workbench. The Workbench is a completely new approach to lesson infrastructure, designed with a focus on accessibility throughout. Alpha testing of this new infrastructure also took place in Q4 2021, and beta testing of the new infrastructure is planned for Q2 2022. The redesigned template includes several new features to make our lesson sites easier for Instructors and learners to use.
• Recruited and onboarded Curriculum Advisors for the Software Carpentry Lesson Program, and six Data Carpentry curricula. This formed part of a project to re-launch the Curriculum Advisors program, one part of a larger effort to strengthen our Community Roles.

Erin Becker · Michael Culshaw-Maurer · François Michonneau · Zhian Kamvar · Toby Hodges

Alpha Testing, Curriculum Advisors Program and more

In Q3 2021, The Curriculum Team:

• Finished alpha testing of curriculum infrastructure redesign
• Continued 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)
• Onboarded 18 new Maintainers for 14 lessons
• Reactivated the Curriculum Advisors program

Erin Becker · Michael Culshaw-Maurer · François Michonneau · Zhian Kamvar · Toby Hodges

Lesson Infrastructure, Lesson Development, and more

• Zhian alpha-tested the new lesson infrastructure with participants from a wide range of skill levels (https://carpentries.org/blog/2021/07/infrastructure-testing/)
• Plan is in place to revive the Curriculum Advisory Committees, in coordination with the Program Committee of the Executive Council. Will start recruiting Q3
• Maintainer Onboarding curriculum was updated ahead of the next round (taking place in Q3). Also published a call for applications to join that upcoming round.
• Filtering and sorting options were added to the Help Wanted page, making it easier for community members to find issues to contribute to e.g. based on language, topic, Lesson Program
• Published guidance for individuals wishing to convert existing lesson content from another format into The Carpentries lesson template.
• Completed inaugural round of Lesson Development Study Groups.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Zhian Kamvar · Toby Hodges

New Maintainer Community Lead and Pilot Astronomy Curriculum

In Q4, we onboarded Daniel Chen as the new Maintainer Community Lead, ran a first pilot for a new Data Carpentry Astronomy curriculum, and continued work on the new lesson template. We have also begun organizing pathways for community engagement around lessons in The Carpentries Incubator. More information about those pathways will be available in Q1 2021.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Zhian Kamvar · Toby Hodges

Lesson Maintainers and Help Wanted Page

In Q3, the Curriculum Team worked with Community member Angela Li to wrap up onboarding and certification for 23 new Lesson Maintainers, polished and publicised a new help wanted page to make it easier for contributors to find places to contribute, and started recruiting users to test elements of our upcoming new lesson template.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Zhian Kamvar

Q2 2020 Work of the Curriculum Development Team

In Q2 2020, The Curriculum Development Team worked on projects including:

• In June-July we ran Maintainer Onboarding and brought on 23 new Maintainers to support core Carpentries lessons.
• We set up “scaffolds” to support learners who have difficulty installing software for online workshops
• We brought on a new part-time staff member to work on developing a Data Carpentry curriculum for Astronomers
• We wrapped up our two year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and published a report detailing what we were able to accomplish with this support, and where we’re going next.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau

Image Analysis Curriculum Beta Release

Data Carpentry’s Image Analysis curriculum has started piloting with Instructors who are not the original lesson authors. In Q1 2020, we hope to publish it on Zenodo, add it to our lesson page, and announce it to the community as a “BETA” lesson. Beta lessons are NOT available upon request (i.e. through the workshop request form), but are considered stable enough for experienced Instructors to teach in Self-Organised workshops.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau

New Data Carpentry Lessons Being Piloted

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The Carpentries Curriculum Team has been working with community collaborators to develop curricula for Economics and Image Analysis. This quarter, Constantin Pape and Dominik Kutra at EMBL, Germany have updated the Image Analysis lesson, authored by Dr. Tessa Durham Brooks and Dr. Mark Meysenburg at Doane College, Nebraska, USA. This update was focused on converting the lesson from one Python library to another that is easier to install and has better documentation - reducing cognitive load for learners. The updated materials are being piloted at EMBL and the University of Arizona in early 2020 and are scheduled for a beta release in Q1 2020. A new curriculum for Economics, teaching Stata and the bash shell is currently in alpha and is targeted for a beta release in mid 2020.

Maintainer Onboarding Program Coming Soon

Members of our Maintainers community are currently planning a reboot of our Maintainer Onboarding program. This program will help ensure new Maintainers are supported in learning the technical and social aspects of maintaining lessons, and will also provide support to existing Maintainers who joined the team before onboarding was available. Onboarding will first be offered to existing Maintainers, with a second round of onboarding for new Maintainers in Q2 2020. For more information, see this discussion on the Maintainers RFC repo.

Carpentries Incubator Launch

With so many members of our community excited about creating and sharing Carpentries-style lesson, we have launched The Carpentries Incubator as a place to share Carpentries-style teaching materials at all stages of development, to collaborate on lesson development, and receive feedback from other community members. Incubator lessons are developed and supported by community members and are not officially endorsed by The Carpentries. We encourage you to browse the Incubator lessons for materials that meet your needs and to use these materials freely. However, we are unable to offer workshops teaching these lessons upon request. In Q1-Q2 2020, we are hiring two new Core Team members to focus on developing a CarpentriesLab platform for sharing high-quality open source curricula and creating infrastructure, documentation, and community engagement pathways for people to contribute curricula to a shared repository for dissemination and discovery.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau

Curriculum Development Handbook

At the end of Q1, we announced the creation of our Curriculum Development Handbook (CDH). The CDH serves as a stand-alone reference manual for folks developing lessons using our lesson template in line with The Carpentries community values and educational philosophy. We’ve now advanced work on this handbook to include information on community development roles and the lesson life cycle. This continues to be a work in progress and contributions as issues or pull requests on this project’s GitHub repository are very welcome! This quarter has also seen the launch of The Carpentries Incubator as a central location for sharing open-source lesson materials and collaborating on new curricular development.

Genomics Curriculum Relaunch

Data Carpentry’s Genomics workshop teaches researchers how to manage their data, access data from popular sequencing databases, automate their analysis pipelines by writing custom Bash scripts, and compute in the cloud. Genomics is a fast-moving field, and starting in August 2017, Instructors began to advocate for updating both the data set and software used, to modernise this workshop and keep it relevant. Over a 22 month period, hundreds of Instructors, helpers, learners, Maintainers, Curriculum Advisors, and others contributed to this major curriculum update and publication. Read our blog post for more details and to get involved in teaching or hosting this workshop!

Lesson Release

Thanks to the more than 1100 of you who contributed, twenty-seven Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry lessons were successfully released on Zenodo this June. Publication provides contributors with a citable work product, and helps us recognise the work our community members do to keep our lessons healthy. If you don’t see yourself listed as an author for a lesson you contributed to, please let us know by contacting team@carpentries.org so we can give you credit for your work.

Image Analysis Curriculum

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the NSF, Data Carpentry has been collaborating with Dr. Tessa Durham Brooks and Dr. Mark Meysenburg at Doane College, Nebraska, USA to develop new lessons in image processing. Drs. Durham Brooks and Meysenburg have piloted this workshop at Doane and are now working with Constantin Pape and Dominik Kutra at EMBL, Germany, to translate the materials to a different Python library, based on pilot feedback. This lesson is considered to be in alpha stage and is cannot be requested as a Centrally-Organised Data Carpentry workshop, but community members are encouraged to work through the material and provide feedback on its GitHub repository. We anticipate a beta-release and pilot workshops at multiple institutions in early 2020.

Economics Curriculum

In addition to the Image Analysis curriculum work discussed above, our grant from The Alfred P. Sloane foundation also focused on development of a new Data Carpentry curriculum for Economics. We have been working with Dr. Miklos Koren at Central European University to draft these lessons, and have piloted one lesson at the European Economics Association Congress in Manchester in August. If you are interested in following or being involved in development of this curriculum, please visit the associated GitHub repositories for the Stata and bash shell lessons.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau

In the first quarter of 2019, the Curriculum Team worked with Maintainers of the Data Analysis and Visualisation in R for Genomics lesson to complete an alpha version of that lesson. Jason Williams and Uwe Hillgert are hosting a pilot workshop using this lesson at the University of Arizona, along with a BugBBQ hacky day to catalyse community work on the Genomics lessons and prepare for publication in June. Thirty-six of The Carpentries lessons are planning to be involved in the June release. Maintainers for those lessons welcome community contributions. Read the blog post to see how you can get involved!

The Curriculum Team also developed an initial draft of a Curriculum Development Handbook, which is now being used by Miklos Koren of Central European University to develop a Data Carpentry curriculum for economics researchers. This team is also working with Tessa Durham Brooks and Mark Meysenburg at Doane College, Nebraska, USA to pilot a workshop for image analysis.

In late May, The Carpentries will begin spreading the word about our updated Genomics curriculum to member institutions and other groups. We are excited to offer more opportunities for Instructors to teach these lessons and will be offering a one-hour webinar starting in June, which will be recorded and offered through our YouTube channel. If you’d like to be notified when the webinar is available, please add your email address here. We will be announcing opportunities to teach these lessons through the Instructors TopicBox list, so make sure you’re signed up to receive these messages! If you’re excited and want to start exploring the curriculum now, you can access all the lessons from the Genomics workshop homepage and can get information on how to launch your own AWS EC2 instance to explore the materials.

Erin Becker · François Michonneau

In Q1 2019, the Curriculum Team worked on updating the format of Maintainer meetings, producing a first draft of a Curriculum Development Handbook, working with the Genomics R Maintainers to make progress towards publishing a lesson for working with Genomics data in R, working with the Maintainers group to develop a prototype for our new lesson template, and working with the Library Carpentry Maintainers and Curriculum Advisors to continue to develop Library Carpentry’s curricula. Whew!

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane · Zhian Kamvar

AMY Updates and Maintenance

• AMY updates
  • Continued the planning of a new feature in AMY that would allow Instructors to sign up for upcoming workshops
  • Added new features that would allow us to capture more accurately the diversity of roles community members have
  • Released a new way to capture consents from AMY users, and especially we now ask for explicit consent for data transfer outside Europe
• General updates
  • Transitioned all our web analytics to Matomo instead of Google Analytics general maintenance of our infrastructure

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane · Zhian Kamvar

AMY Updates and Maintenance

• Started planning work for new features in AMY:
  • Instructors will be able to register their interest in upcoming workshops directly from AMY
  • We are improving how we capture how community members are involved in various aspects of our community to better reflect their engagement with us.
• Continued our work to review our practices and policies to comply with international privacy laws.
• Provided support to the other teams for the implementation of their projects.
• Performed ongoing maintenance of our infrastructure.

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane · Zhian Kamvar

AMY Updates and Maintenance

• Developed and implemented new features in AMY that let us better track The Carpentries memberships. Tested these features across The Carpentries Core Team. Created plan for to bring data up to date with these new features.
• Implemented new features in AMY that let us better track individuals (Instructors, Trainers, etc.) with more explicit consents about how data is stored, used, and archived.
• Enhanced systems for accounts inventory, ensuring we have a complete, accurate, and up to date log of individual and team access to various accounts, including current and former users.
• Assorted updates to our website, including standardizing publication of all our profile pages (Instructors, Trainers, etc.) and data feeds.
• Continued maintenance and upgrades to our servers

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane · Zhian Kamvar

Transitions to Online Workshops

• Continued work in support of our transition to online workshops. This includes updates to our database that allow us to track online workshops.
• Began work to ensure all our systems are in compliance with privacy and security policies. This includes drafting security and privacy policies and creating a risk assessment plan. It also includes auditing our existing systems to track what levels of access individuals have on the platforms we use, and creating systems to modify account level access as appropriate.
• Planning work to create a structure to manage our membership infrastructure, allowing us to better track our work with member organizations, reporting on their activity, and supporting their growth. These systems will be implemented in 2021.
• Training for Core Team to make best use of our technology platforms. Teaching specific skills like writing SQL queries to strengthen Core Team members capacity to access and analyze existing data.

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane · Zhian Kamvar

Q2 2020 Work for the Infrastructure Team

In Q2 2020, The Infrastructure Team worked on the following:

• Compliance: continue to work on privacy and security policies
• Online workshops: updates to workshop template to make it easier to share information with participants
• Lesson infrastructure: planning for next version of lesson template (see blog post), improved checking automations/continuous integration for current lesson template

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane

Automating Routine Emails for Workshops

In Q1 2020, we continued our work to ensure the robustness of our Infrastructure system, and on improving documentation around it. We welcomed Zhian as a new team member. We provided support to all the other teams for their infrastructure needs. We are putting place systems to automate emails within AMY for workshop-related tasks, and in other parts of our workflows, for instance, to automatically remind instructors to sign up for pre- and post-workshop discussions. We integrated Calendly in the scheduling of pre- and post-workshop discussions. We set up a test instance of CodiMD (the open-source version of the popular collaborative Markdown editor) at https://codimd.carpentries.org We also started to make changes to our infrastructure to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, including setting up an instance of Discourse at https://forum.carpentries.org to provide a space for community members to exchange tips and experience for teaching our workshops online.

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane

Workshop Surveys

In October, we rolled out an update to our pre- and post-workshop surveys that provides a more intuitive and (hopefully) a better overall experience for both learners and Instructors. Learners can now complete the surveys more quickly, and Instructors now receive a clearer and more actionable overview of their learners’ survey responses. With this new system, we can customise the way results are presented to ensure they are maximally useful for Instructors. If you check your survey results and find yourself thinking “I would really like to see things visualised this way instead” please get in touch! We’re also seeking a community member to review the code used to generate these reports, as we prepare to open-source this code as a Shiny app. Please contact François if you’re interested. For any other questions about this new system, please contact team@carpentries.org.

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane

Infrastructure Documentation and Systems

We continued improving documentation and management of our infrastructure systems. We’ve cleaned up and systematised repository access across our 50+ lesson repos, and have created Maintainer teams in GitHub to make permissions easier to keep up to date moving forward. These teams also provide opportunities for Maintainers to use GitHub’s team-based communication features.

We’ve put a system in place for management and development of AMY, our internal database. AMY is where we manage data on instructor certification, workshops, instructor training events, memberships, and more and is central to the work of many of our staff team members. By systematising how we handle bug fixes, prioritise enhancements to existing features, and implement new feature requests, we can optimise developer time and ensure this work best supports our communities needs.

Survey Migration to Typeform

Until recently, all of our pre- and post-workshop surveys have been hosted on SurveyMonkey. As our community grows, we have developed new needs for survey hosting and data storage. We began to investigate Typeform as an alternative survey platform in early 2019 and piloted it with a few workshops. Feedback from instructors was very positive and Typeform makes it easier to develop custom workflow with the data collected. Transitioning to Typeform was also a good opportunity to revamp how results from the pre- and post-workshop surveys are presented to instructors (see below).

Instructor-focused Reports from Workshop Survey Feedback

A core value of our community is continued improvement through feedback. Learners at our workshops complete pre- and post-workshop surveys. That data is used to inform our overall assessment and is also made available to individual Instructors for their workshops. The format of the survey results output from SurveyMonkey, however, is not easy to interpret and act upon. Our goal is to make it easier for Instructors to review feedback from their learners and make actionable changes in their teaching (and also to know what worked well!). We’ve been working to create an Instructor-focused survey results format, which will present this information to Instructors in a clear way. In Q3, we have developed the infrastructure needed to provide a website that will present the results of the surveys to the instructors. We plan to roll out this new system to all our workshops in Q4, and extend it to instructor training events in early 2020.

Lesson Program Website Template

As each our our lesson programs (Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry) have grown, so have their websites, driven by a team of dedicated community. This growth has meant that the websites have developed inconsistent structures, often making it difficult for new and veteran community members alike to find the information they are looking for. In Q3, we began developing a standard template for all three lesson program websites, to ensure they all have the same navigation and site map, and only contain lesson program specific content. All other content will be directed to The Carpentries website and handbook. A small group of community members has provided feedback on the redesign. In future quarters, we will be developing a remote theme based on this design. The three lesson program sites (and any new lesson program site) will connect to this theme, ensuring we maintain a consistent structure as we continue to grow.

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane

2018 was spent transitioning from the separate identities of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry to a unified identity of “The Carpentries”, welcoming in Library Carpentry as an official lesson program, and transitioning to Community Initiatives as our fiscal sponsor. We spent the early part of 2019 ensuring this new identity is reflected across all our platforms (front facing and back end). This included things like updating documentation across all four websites, The Carpentries Handbook, lesson templates and other materials, and we’re continuing this work in the second quarter of 2019.

For Q2 our projects include updating the workshop surveys to use a more flexible and robust backend data structure, and more relevant presentation of the results for instructors. We have also heard that people are using Carpentries lessons outside our workshops, and that they are looking for ways to contribute to sustain our organisation. For instance, the Data Carpentry R Ecology lesson receives more than 15,000 unique visitors per month! We’re evaluating having an unobtrusive ‘Donate’ button on the lesson, to see if it’s a way people want to support our work.

Each quarter, we will also be supporting all the other teams in their infrastructure, technology, and documentation needs. This includes ensuring documentation for new projects is up to date, and new projects are supported in evaluating and implementing new tools (web services, databases, etc.)

François Michonneau · Maneesha Sane

In Q1 2019, the Infrastructure Team worked on organising and documenting our infrastructure systems and on migrating our surveys from SurveyMonkey to Typeform.

Karen Word · Kelly Barnes · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy · Sher! Hurt

Q4 of 2021 was a time for wrapping up long-term projects as well as consolidation and evaluation of the internal processes for the Instructor Training team.

The team implemented a major overhaul of its communications with Instructor trainees from start to finish. We finalized and released updates to our Instructor Training curriculum. As the team prepared for one of its team-members to depart on leave, they invested time in cross-training as well as examining the work that we do and identifying opportunities for future improvement. The team also opened applications for Trainer Training as well as nominations for the second year of elected Leadership in the Trainer community.

Karen Word · Kelly Barnes · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy · Sher! Hurt

In Q3 2021, the Instructor Training Team

• Released the Instructor Training Report
• Started work on Instructor Training Communications Overhaul
• Continued work on Curriculum updates including development of an Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility episode
• Certified 14 new Trainers

Karen Word · Kelly Barnes · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy · Sher! Hurt

In Q2 2021, the Instructor Training Team

• Continued ongoing work to schedule, manage, and track instructor training and trainee progress
• Released an internal version of the Instructor Training Report to the Core Team. The purpose of this report is to provide an update on the growth, success, and challenges of the Instructor Training Program and help us identify trends and opportunities that can drive continuous program improvement. In Q3 we will be releasing a public version of this report to the broader Carpentries community.
• Began a substantial update to the Instructor Training Curriculum to update content and address outstanding issues in the repository. These updates are expected to go live sometime in Q3.
• Recruited and began training 14 new Instructor Trainers. These new Trainers will be badged in July.
• Continued making improvements to the curriculum and scheduling of the Online Teaching Bonus Module.

Karen Word · Kelly Barnes · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy · Sher! Hurt

Trainer Badging and Assessment

• Trained and badged 14 new Trainers
• Provisional leadership for the Trainer community proposed a governance structure and are accepting nominations for an elected body
• Across Q3 and Q4 we have been orienting our assessment for the Instructor Training program and beyond and we look forward to putting that to work in a more developed assessment project in 2021.

Karen Word · Kelly Barnes · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy · Sher! Hurt

Trainer Training and Bonus Modules

• Opened & reviewed Trainer Training Applications
• Launched bonus module to support certified Instructors in preparing to teach online
• Completed version 2 of Online Training Recommendations
• The Trainer community ratified an updated Trainer Agreement

Erin Becker · Karen Word · Sher! Hurt

Preparation and Implementation of Online Workshops Pilot

In Q2 2020, The Instructor Training team worked on the following items:

• Collaborating with The Carpentries Online Workshops Task Force to prepare the initial Recommendations for Teaching Carpentries Workshops Online
• Developing and implementing assessment strategies to evaluate and improve the Recommendations
• Drafting a pilot 3-hour workshop for certified Instructors to support preparation to teach online
• Collaborating with the Workshop Administration Team to add a Supporting Instructor role for Centrally-Organised workshops to ease the transition to online teaching for inexperienced Carpentries Instructors

Erin Becker · Karen Word · Sher! Hurt

Instructor Training Report

We are going to be scaling up our Instructor Training program by 30-50% in the next three years. We need to figure out what that entails, in terms of resource allocation and which parts in our process are inefficient. In Q1 2020, we started looking into trends in Instructor, trainee, and applicant diversity based on past program decisions, with a goal to develop clear preliminary benchmark(s) of quality that we can track as we make changes, among other things. Our findings will be shared in our Instructor Training report. This work is still in progress, albeit breifly halted to prioritise the piloting of online training in The Carpentries in Q2 and Q3 2020.

Scaling Up Instructor Training

Our Instructor Training program is growing rapidly and continued growth is expected in the coming months. To be ready for this growth, in Q1 2020, we started analysing our existing systems, identified areas where processes could be streamlined or automated, and implement these new procedures. While this work is ongoing, we managed to onboard 14 new Instructor Trainers in Q1 2020.

Erin Becker · Karen Word · Sher! Hurt

Training New Instructor Trainers

In November 2019, we opened applications for our next round of Instructor Trainer Training. We focused on supporting current Instructor Trainers (by reserving seats for applicants where we currently have a single Trainer) and recruiting regional or institutional pioneers (by reserving seats for pairs of applicants in regions or at institutions with no existing Trainers). We also considered applications from individuals who didn’t fall into these two groups, to onboard amazing new Trainers regardless of their location. We received 43 applications, and unfortunately were only able to accept 14 applicants into this cohort. These Trainer trainees will go through a 3-month onboarding and join our existing 75 member-strong Trainer team in mid-Q2 2020. As we hire our new Deputy Director of Instructor Training, we look forward to expanding our capacity for training new Trainers and bringing more of our amazing applicants onto the team! To receive notifications about future Trainer Training opportunities, contact Karen Word at krword@carpentries.org.

Erin Becker · Karen Word · Sher! Hurt

Instructor Trainer Recruitment and Alumni Program

Our Trainers teach Instructor Training, lead teaching demonstrations, and support continued improvement of our Instructor Training curriculum. This community has grown from one member in 2012 (Greg Wilson) to nearly eighty in 2019. Community members become Trainers through our Trainer Training program, an 8-week course covering pedagogy and Carpentries practices.

We have not yet had a formal recruitment strategy for this program, leading to unbalanced geographical growth of this community. This project was initially conceived to create such a strategy, to help make Trainer recruitment more intentional and transparent. Following discussions with members of the staff Leadership and Membership Teams, we determined that we have enough Trainers to meet our projected capacity needs and don’t need to run another Trainer Training in this calendar year.

However, it has become clear that the number of certified Trainers doesn’t give a full picture of our capacity. Changing careers and lives mean that the availability of our Trainer community-members to participate in training events and other community responsibilities can also change, and our program had no way to account for or embrace those changes. With feedback from the Trainer community, we have developed a Trainer Alumni Program to enable Trainers to take a planned leave of absence. With this program, we will now have a more accurate estimate of our capacity for Instructor Training, and Trainers will have a guilt-free opportunity to take a break or step down from Trainer duties. Twelve (14%) Trainers have transitioned to an Alumni role, with the remaining 76 reaffirming their commitment and availability to support Instructor Training through September 2020. We look forward to welcoming a new class of Trainers early next year. Please expect a call for applications in November 2019!

Teaching Demonstration Scheduling

In January, we increased the number of teaching demonstration sessions we ran to make it easier for Instructor trainees to complete their checkout. However, we found Trainer availability doesn’t follow a specific pattern, leaving many demo sessions without hosts. This placed a burden on trainees, when demos were cancelled, and also on a few highly-engaged Trainers and staff, who often hosted at the last minute. We’ve now changed the way we schedule demos, allowing Trainers to choose any time that fits their schedule (rather than from a collection of repeating time slots). This has the added benefit of distributing sessions over a wider set of times, making it easier for trainees to find a time that works for them. With this new system, Trainers have met or exceeded our 12 sessions per month goal for every month from August through October!

Erin Becker · Karen Word · Sher! Hurt

In the first quarter of 2019, we addressed the fact that we had no existing workflow to handle “odd cases” of instructor training requests. While these are largely run in the context of membership, there are occasional events where our membership model does not fit well. There are also sometimes questions about whether additional seats can be added to existing in-person instructor training events. We now have a workflow to handle these occasional requests and assign charges or scholarships in each case. We still expect most events to be arranged through membership, but anyone with a request that doesn’t fit can now contact Karen to get the ball rolling. We learned a lot about the needs of our community in developing this process, and have been gratified to learn that people are pleased to have a pathway to accomplish their training goals.

For Q2, we will be reviewing and recommending improvements to our procedures for recruiting and selecting Instructor Trainers. Our Trainer community is a powerful force in setting the tone and direction of The Carpentries as a whole – they train our Instructors! In the past, our process for recruitment and selection has been successful in recruiting amazing and dedicated Trainers, but in the absence of explicit structure it has also been confusing and opaque. This is an entirely new project, which will take the long view on strategic planning for The Carpentries, with the aim of creating a process that is transparent, fair, equitable, and effective in recruiting trainees who are enthusiastic about our mission and empowered to carry it forward. We anticipate rolling out our next call for Instructor Trainer recruitment in September-November of 2019, so the broader community and interested applicants can look forward to learning more about our new and improved processes at that time!

Erin Becker · Karen Word · Sher! Hurt

In Q1 2019, the Instructor Training Team worked on producing a workflow for offering a-la carte Instructor Trainings outside of our membership program.

Erin Becker · Angelique Trusler · Kari Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

In Q4 2021, the Membership Team made progress towards Goal 1 of our Strategic Plan “Build regional and local capacity to empower sustainable communities” by launching a geographically-tiered pricing structure for our programming, which will enable us to better serve organisations outside high-income countries. We also initiated a financial support program to offer support for organisations who are unable to pay our standard fees, irrespective of location.

Al Obayuwana · Angelique Trusler · Kari Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Member Organisation Council Meetings and more

• Started a pricing pilot for the quarter, looking to close the budget gap while understanding our growing pains and challenges.
• Reengaging the member organisations through council meetings. Planning out intentional quarterly community sessions (not sit and gets)
• Revamped the membership workflow to reduce redundancy and create better member experience
• Created a sliding scale and financial assistance component to membership for equity

Al Obayuwana · Angelique Trusler · Kari Jordan · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Pricing Models and Infrastructure

• Began to explore pricing models with goal of strengthening organisational structure and creating ability to be responsive
• Support capacity for organisations to be empowered in their communities
• Discussed how to make membership more accessible as well as workshops and trainings
• Discussed membership organisation touch points and began to develop a framework for reaching out and check-ins
• Membership infrastructure project - Hackathon to transfer data from Asana to AMY (lead by Maneesha)
• Rolled out 6-month check in emails to member organisations from June 2021

Erin Becker · François Michonneau · Karen Word · Kari L. Jordan · Serah Njambi Kiburu · Sher! Hurt · Angelique Trusler

Platinum Membership Update and New Team Member

In Q4, the Membership Team updated our Platinum membership tier to improve transparency of this customizable membership level and ensure the way we work with Platinum members is equitable across different organizations. We also reintroduced our Bronze tier as an entry-level membership for organizations who want to support The Carpentries and do not yet plan to train local Instructors. This quarter also saw the first pilot of a New Member Onboarding program - details to follow in Q1 2021!

The Membership team is also currently recruiting a new Deputy Director or Director of Partnerships to provide planning, vision, and implementation of this program and represent the needs of member organisations in strategic development.

Ariel Deardorff · Elizabeth Williams

Developing Data Savvy Librarians in California

We have identified a need for data and computational training among academic librarians throughout California. While the goal of Library Carpentry is to provide this training, outside of a few Carpentries-heavy institutions, there is currently little awareness of The Carpentries or the training the organisation provides. Led by Ariel Deardorff, we hope to pilot new consortial models of Carpentries Membership to develop sustainable Carpentries communities throughout California that increase the state’s capacity to offer training in data and software skills to librarians through this project from Q1 2020. If successful, these models will be expanded to other kinds of library communities in a variety of institutional environments as well as to other regions outside of California. More details about this can be found in Ariel’s January 2020 blog post.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

Member Survey and Member Organisation Council

In October and November, we shared our 2019 Membership Survey data and held Member Organisation Council discussions around these survey responses. Our primary goal for this survey was to identify what could be added to and improved about Carpentries Membership to better align with the growing and diversifying needs and goals of local communities everywhere. Members identified as priorities: support in building and sustaining their local communities, increased support for Instructors and learners, pathways for curriculum development, and a more varied membership model. Our [grant funding from Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] directly supports the first three of these goals, and indirectly provides more Core Team time for expanding our membership model. We are excited to continue working with our Member Organisation Council, and community leaders, in building a robust and varied membership program to support our diverse communities.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

Member Organisation Council Meeting and Survey

We held another set of Member Organisation Council Meetings the week of June 17th. There were five meetings that brought together folks building Carpentries communities at their organisations through memberships. The meeting included general discussion on the topic of ‘Managing the Overhead of Membership, Capacity and Community Building’ to share tips, solutions and challenges around building and sustaining local communities. We remain excited about the ability of these meetings to bring member organisation representatives from around the world together to share ideas. We were also able to share some preliminary results from our 2019 Member Organisation Survey at the meetings. This survey focused on the goals different organisations have for membership and the areas of membership we could develop to help attain those goals. So far, we can see that there is enthusiasm for exploring the addition of curriculum development, community building resources, and learner support to our membership program. We would like to gather more input from member organisation representatives through this survey and are excited to discuss the results in the next Member Organisation Council meeting. With community and staff input, we can determine the additions and improvements that should be prioritised for maximum impact across Member Organisations.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

This quarter, the Membership Team is working to organise and hold our Q2 Member Organisation Council Meeting and to create and send out a Member Organisation Survey. The Member Organisation Council Meetings have been a place for representatives from Member Organisations to network, share challenges and solutions, receive updates about Carpentries activities, and voice ideas about the Membership program. In our last Council meeting at the end of 2018, members expressed interest in quarterly meetings, and we are excited to kick them off in this quarter. In the Member Organisation Survey, we will be seeking feedback on Member Organisations’ goals for membership and additions and improvements we could make to help the Membership Program better align with these goals.

Elizabeth Williams · Tracy Teal

In Q1 2019, the Membership Team worked on creating and deploying a membership survey.

SherAaron Hurt · Angelique Trusler · Danielle Sieh · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

For Q4 2021 the Workshop Administration Team focused on planning for the transition of online permanent workshops. Since the beginning of the pandemic, online workshops were being piloting. In 2020, we announced that we would make the decision by the the 2021, if we would continue to offer online workshops based on the success throughout the upcoming year. To help make this decision the project members included a representative from all of the teams. We took time to go through all of the blog posts written by the community regarding online workshops and made recommendations accordingly. The group identified where to update workflows and documentation. The work done in Q4 2021 will be implemented throughout 2022.

SherAaron Hurt · Angelique Trusler · Danielle Sieh · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

In Q3 2021 the WAT

• Began internal preparation for shifting the Regional Coordinator program to CDT
• Continued working on Instructor Selection Project
• Launched the In-person Survey to gather feedback from Instructors, Workshop Hosts and Member organisations
• 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

SherAaron Hurt · Angelique Trusler · Danielle Sieh · Maneesha Sane · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

In Q2 the WAT

• Planned for the automation of the Instructor Recruitment Project. The WAT created a wishlist for the Infrastructure team to identify what we wanted in a perfect world :)
• Started a working group on Instructor Recruitment to identify what motivates the instructors to teach to help solve the problem of instructors not signing up to teach
• Developed a Task Force for how to address feedback given towards the instructors after teaching a workshop
• Developed a plan to begin gathering information for planning for in-person workshops
• Started a discussion series.. WAT presents that focused on Self-Organised workshops
• Assessed the role of the Regional Coordinator to identify how to develop the role further and make it work for the community and CT
• Created a SWOT analysis to help determine the next set of priorities for the WAT

Angelique Trusler · Maneesha Sane · SherAaron Hurt · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Regional Coordinator Onboarding

• Continued finalising the Automated Email project. During Q4 the WAT presented the work done so far to the RC. The RC were given a prelude to what their new workflow will consist of. This project will cut the time to process workshops coordination in half.
• The WAT developed a workflow for onboarding new Regional Coordinators. Previously, there was no official onboarding process. During this quarter, the official onboarding presentation was developed along with the agenda and content for a 4 hour session to introduce new RC’s to our workflows.
• The WAT also updated several workflows that would help with the email automation project and the RC onboarding project. We had several outdated instructions that no longer applied to our current workflows.

Angelique Trusler · Maneesha Sane · SherAaron Hurt · Talisha Sutton-Kennedy

Automated Emails

The WAT worked on Automated Emails. This has been an ongoing project to transition the Regional Coordinators to use our automated email system for their workflow. We have been testing this on US/African based workshops.