24 April - 4 May, 2016: Subcommittees and Task Forces, Partnerships, Instructor Training, A Vacancy, Lab Meeting, Bug Barbeque, Discuss, and New Videos and a Book

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Highlights

• The 2016 Steering Committee invites you to help organize and develop resources and activities to support our community members by proposing new initiatives in the form of subcommittees and task forces. Full instructions on the proposal process can be found here. The Steering Committee will gladly help! Also check out the subcommittee listing for information on existing and past subcommittees.
• Joint partnerships are now offered by Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry! Read the partnership information on how to become a partner and get in touch.

Vacancy

• Data Carpentry is hiring a Deputy Director of Assessment. Visit the Data Carpentry jobs page for a full job description and application procedure.

Events

• Tune in to the Software Carpentry Lab Meeting on May 10th to discuss what’s new and upcoming in the community. Check out the Lab Meeting Etherpad for the schedule and connection details.
• Join the worldwide Software Carpentry Bug Barbeque on June 13 to help fix bugs in Version 5.4 of Software Carpentry lessons before publication. All contributors will receive credit for your hard work with a citable object.

Conversations

• A recent conversation on the discuss mailing list prompted the creation of two new issues open for discussion in GitHub:
  • How should we deal with high-volume discussions on the mailing list?
  • Is the Code of Conduct saying what the community want/need it to say and how should it be enforced?

Videos and Books

• Greg Wilson published a video of “things not to do while teaching”. The material is great to use during instructor training to demonstrate to instructor trainees what we’re trying to avoid when teaching and is based on suggestions made in this discussion on GitHub.
• Support Data Carpentry by buying the book How to Be a Modern Scientist written by Jeff Leek. The book includes guides for reviewing papers, reading papers, career planning, and giving talks.
• Iñigo Aldazabal Mensa (CSIC-UPV/EHU) provided a video of him explaining Software Carpentry in great detail at the 2016 HPC Knowledge Portal Conference - Software Carpentry: teaching computing skills to researchers.

Other

• Did you recently participate in a Software Carpentry workshop and had questions that weren’t answered by the lessons? Do you teach workshops and hear questions from participants that can’t be addressed by the existing materials? Please add these questions to this post.
• What have we learned from our lesson discussion sessions so far? We welcome all new instructors to provide feedback about their experience of the sessions by commenting on the post.
• Aleksandra Pawlik recently blogged about her experience when she visited South Africa for the first face-to-face Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training in Africa.
• Planning on running a Software Carpentry workshop with R? Read how three sticky notes and chocolates helped participants in the Sotware Carpentry workshop at Griffith University.
• Staff members from iDigBio gave their perspective on attending a Software Carpentry workshop. They encourage all researchers who’d like to work with the iDigBio datasets to particpipate in a workshop near them or request one at their own institution.
• 16 workshops were run over the past 16 days. For more information about past workshops, please visit our website.
• Upcoming Workhshops
  • May: University of Toronto, Bancroft Building - University of Toronto, Charles Darwin University, University of British Columbia, University of Cambridge, CSDMS Annual Meeting, Royal Holloway - University of London, SciPy Latin America, UBC Koerner Library, University of British Columbia, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Oklahoma State University, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, McMaster University - Kenneth Taylor Hall (KTH) B121, Colorado Special Libraries Association @ CU Boulder, Lund University, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology, South Florida Water Management District, University of Toronto, Centro de Competência em Software Livre
  • June: University of Wisconsin - Madison, University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, Université Bishop’s, University of Cincinnati, NeSI-Massey Albany Software Carpentry, LANGEBIO-Cinvestav, University of Wisconsin - Madison, SIB @ University of Lausanne, University Library Basel, Materials Physics Center - University of the Basque Country, NERC / The University of Leeds, NERC / The University of Leeds
  • July: R workshop - The University of Queensland, Philippines
  • October: UC San Diego