April 2015 Lab Meeting
Agenda
- Update on finances (Jason Williams)
- Workshops for companies (Karin Lagesen / Matt Davis)
- LinkedIn group for instructors: https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=8279689
- Volunteer wanted to administer
- Managing the flood of email and GitHub notifications (Greg Wilson)
- Looking for a new volunteer sys admin (Greg Wilson)
- Update on lessons
- shell-extras (Christina Koch): https://github.com/swcarpentry/shell-extras
- Examples of beginner problems (Noam Ross): http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-March/002816.html
- Making lessons citable by giving them DOIs
- https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
- Aim to have everything stable (enough) by the end of April
- http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2015-some-workshop-or-unconference-ideas.html
10:00 Eastern
- Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry Foundation)
- Tiffany Timbers (Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada)
- Luiz Irber (Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA)
- Jonah Duckles (University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA)
- Timothée Poisot (université de Montréal)
- Raniere Silva
- Noam Ross (UC Davis)
- Amy Brown (unaffiliated, Toronto)
- Karin Lagesen (University of Oslo)
- Anelda van der Walt (Talarify)
- Emily Davenport (Cornell University)
- John Blischak (University of Chicago)
- Ashwin Srinath (Clemson University)
- Arliss Collins (Mozilla Science Lab)
- Frank Willmore (Independent research professional)
- Victor Kwangchun Lee (xwMOOC, Korea)
- Piotr Banaszkiewicz (AGH-UST, Kraków, Poland)
- Olav Vahtras (KTH Sweden)
- François Michonneau (University of Florida)
- Klemens Noga (ACC Cyfronet AGH, Kraków, Poland)
- Kate Hertweck (U Texas Tyler)
- Denis Haine (U of Montreal)
- Neal Davis (U of Illinois)
- Sarah Stevens (U of Wisconsin - Madison)
- Daniel Turek (UC Berkeley)
- Logan Cox (University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA)
- Camille Avestruz (Yale University)
- Abigail Cabunoc Mayes (Mozilla Science Lab)
- Mark Wilber (University of California, Santa Barbara)
- Isabelle Laforest-L. (Université du Québec a Montréal)
- Aleksandra Pawlik (SSI, University of Manchester)
- Laurent Gatto (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Sue McClatchy (The Jackson Laboratory)
- Kai Blin (DTU, Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Ethan White (University of Florida / Utah State University)
- Chris Kotfila (University at Albany, SUNY)
- Jason Williams (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Jeramia Ory (King's College, PA)
- Pauline Barmby (Northern Harvard University, London Canada)
- Peter van Heusden (SANBI, University of the Western Cape, South Africa)
- Caroline Li
- Matthew Aiello-Lammens (UConn)
- Easton White (UC- Davis)
- Billy Rowell (HHMI Janelia Farm Campus) (listening only)
- Leigh Sheneman (MSU)
- Adina Howe (ISU)
- Giacomo Peru (SSI, Edinburgh)
- Katy Huff (ucberkeley)
19:00 Eastern
- Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry Foundation)
- Matt Davis
- Damien Irving (University of Melbourne)
- Nichole Bennett (University of Texas at Austin)
- Joshua Ainsley (Fino Consulting)
- Lauren Michael (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Sheldon McKay
- Lynne Williams (Child and Family Research Imaging Facility)
- Gabriel Devenyi (Douglas Institute)
- Tom Kelly (University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ)
- Christina Koch (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
- Gayathri Swaminathan
- Dominic Barraclough
- Zhuo Fu (UVA)
- Hamid Mokhtarzadeh (U of MN)
- Julia Gustavsen (University of British Columbia)
- Fan Yang (Iowa State University)
- Chris Friedline (Virginia Commonwealth University)
- Ivan Gonzalez
- Bill Mills (Mozilla Science Lab)
- Noam Ross (UC Davis, @noamross)
- Daniel Chen (Virginia Tech)
- Steve Haddock (MBARI, practicalcomputing.org)
- Adam Thomas (National Institutes of Health)
- Bernhard Konrad (UBC)
- François Michonneau (University of Florida)
- John Corless (Dallas, TX)
Notes:
- Jason: SCF is starting to bring in workshop fees ($8200 for January?)
- uncollected fees ~2x collected fees right now
- working on long-term followup & articulation of expectations
- Karin/Matt: Following up on the discussion about workshops for commercial companies the steering committee has decided to run a pilot program
- For profit companies charged $5000 for 1st workshop, $3000 for subsequent
- i.e., 4X what we charge non-profit orgs
- Instructors will work like normal (not be paid, travel covered)
- A portion of extra fees will be used to run workshops for institutions that can't afford fees
- After pilot will seek additional feedback
- For profit companies charged $5000 for 1st workshop, $3000 for subsequent
- Karin: Notes from Steering Committee meetings are now openly available in the repo
- Greg: LinkedIn group for instructors
- https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=8279689
- Looking for a volunteer to help manage this, please get in touch
- Leigh Sheneman volunteers to help
- Lynne Williams volunteers to help <williams.lynne99@gmail.com>
- (Aleksandra: Leigh, let us know if you'd like support from one more person; basically, feel free to send a note on Discuss)
- Managing the flood of email
- One solution is change the way that we manage the groups. All instructors are in one group that have read/write access to all the lessons. We are going to split this into small groups (one for lesson) so that people don't get all email notification by default.
- Gabriel Devenyi volunteers for GitHub group testing
- One solution is change the way that we manage the groups. All instructors are in one group that have read/write access to all the lessons. We are going to split this into small groups (one for lesson) so that people don't get all email notification by default.
- Need a new sys admin volunteer
- Peter van Heusden <pvh@sanbi.ac.za>
- Gabriel Devenyi <gdevenyi@gmail.com>
- Noam Ross is working on a few improvements for the R lesson like: where learners can get help after the workshop, how they can solve their own problem, ... Started a repo, https://github.com/noamross/zero-dependency-problems, where he is gathering examples from various fora and workshops of the types of things that typical students run into. Interested in contributions from people -- directly from student questions -- also for feedback on lessons, in terms of what material has already been covered, minimal reproducible examples. A question is how much this should be independent material versus being exercises/materials incorporated into Novice Lessons. Short term hope: people contribute example of questions/problems. Where do beginners hit a wall? How beginners should ask the questions? Everything is R: would be nice to have Python, Shell, SQL, ... as well. Some of the material might end up being good examples/exercises.
- Greg: SWC and Data Carpentry exists also to have these non-technical questions answered.
- Christina Koch revive the idea of extra material for our lessons. This is a experimental. This week we had a email thread about the need to drop some things from our lessons and move it to extra or something similar.
- We want to have our novice lessons stable at the end of April to have a DOI.
- On NEON http://neondataskills.org
- DOI is for a particular version of a repository. You decide when you need a new DOI -- when there are enough changes to need one. People have been asking for a DOI so they can cite lessons.
- If anyone has time to help clean up lessons in advance of getting the DOI, that would be great!
- Tom: In R lesson we have one section called supplementary material.
- Greg: You can add material into R lesson but people believe that they need to cover what are in the lesson so maybe keep it in another location is better.
- using smaller chunks for lessons: 10 min instead of 15-20 sections? could try with select repo
- Titus's ideas: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2015-some-workshop-or-unconference-ideas.html
- Pauline: Q: What works for convincing orgs that its' worthwhile to bring groups in from the outside?
- Aleksandra: One option is to offer to train up internal instructors. First couple of workshops can help with this training and fill the gap in the meantime.
- Offloading administrative work -- university wants host to do all administration to "save" the cost of the SWC administration fee.
- Path to affiliate status (better where its easier to have a budget item rather than ad-hoc)
- Several thousand hours are invested in our lessons (but this only sways a few people)
- Workshops are always over-subscribed
- Satisfies the 'training' obligation you agreed to on your grant last year
- Lesson sprint for summer:
- Potential co-organizers (invite leaders and participants, ...)
- Neal Davis
- Tiffany Timbers (maybe)
- Sheldon McKay
- Potential co-organizers (invite leaders and participants, ...)
- How to consult the Software Carpentry community about changes/ideas
- Mail the discuss list for medium-large changes
- Move detailed discussion to GH issue/repo
- Small, lesson-specific questions in GH repo