# Meeting 25 April 2022

## About

This is the UK Carpentry Community space for the UK Carpentry instructors, helpers and workshop coordinators (or anyone involved in training tech to researchers in general and outside of the UK) to get to know each other better, update the commmunity about developments, discuss issues and ideas, and encourage collaboration.

During these meetings, we will be conforming to [The Carpentries Code of Conduct](https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/policies/code-of-conduct.html).

**Meeting schedule: meetings happen on 4th Monday each month, 16:00-17:00 UK time, BST (UTC+1) or GMT (UTC+0) depending on the time of the year**

**Meeting details are shared via [local-uk mailing list](https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/local-uk) and [The Carpentries community calendar](https://carpentries.org/community/#community-events).**

**Community's HackMD workspace: https://hackmd.io/team/local-uk?nav=overview**

**Previous meetings: https://hackmd.io/V3ReKkEESzqyCNxWJdulOw#Meetings**

**Chairing rota: https://hackmd.io/@local-uk/rkPK1Si7F**

**Guest speaker sign up: https://hackmd.io/@local-uk/rkkzBTLOd**

## Meeting Minutes

**Location:** Zoom URL: https://zoom.us/j/95360073649

**Chair:** Mario Antonioletti

**Timekeeper:** Aleks Nenadic

**Notetaker:** Aleks Nenadic / Andrew Walker

### Agenda
0. Assign notetaker & timekeeper
1. Sign in & ice-breaker
1. Review of actions
2. Announcements
- [SSI's Research Software Camp, 16 - 27 May](https://www.software.ac.uk/RSCamp-next-steps-coding)
- [Carpenties Lesson Development Training](https://carpentries.github.io/lesson-development-training/pilot-description.html) - pilot #1 will take place 13-16 June 2022 (12:00-16:00 UTC) and 27-28 July 2022 (12:00-16:00 UTC)
- [FORRT(Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training)](https://forrt.org/) are hosting an [Open Day 4 May](https://uni-jena-de.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Mpde6hpj0jG9S8zv0gQ_owVjJkuxzh3sWA)
- [CarpentryCon 2022](https://2022.carpentrycon.org/) is happening in August!
4. Round robin talks - what are you up to, any interesting activities you'd like to share, events or news?
5. Instructor Training checkout questions
6. Wrap-up/AOB

### Sign-in

Name/pronoun if you like/ institution / optionally put "(checkout)" if you are here for the Instructor Training checkout:

1. Winfred Gatua/She,her,hers/University of Bristol
2. Aleks Nenadic, she/her, SSI/Uni of Manchester
3. Mario Antonioletti, he/him, SSI/EPCC/University of Edinburgh
4. Andrew Walker, he/him, University of Oxford
5. Matthew Bluteau, he/him, UK Atomic Energy Authority, :bird: @mattasdata :octopus: @bielsnohr
6. Colin Sauze, he/him, Aberystwyth University/Supercomputing Wales
7. Lucia Michielin, she/her, CDCS (Centre for Data Culture & Society, Univeristy of Edinburgh)
8. Jonathan Stoneman, he/him, freelance trainer
9. Alycia Crall, she/her, The Carpentries
10. Jannetta Steyn, she/her, Newcastle University
11. Juan Herrera, he/him, EPCC - The University of Edinburgh.
12. Lucie Woellenstein, she/her, University of Edinburgh

### Notes

#### Actions

No actions to review.

#### Announcments

SSI research camp 16th - 27th May. Includes some mentoring. Looking for mentors and mentees. Camp includes lessons in Spanish and Italian. email Mario or Aleks or see link in notes above. R instructors may be needed.

Capentries lesson development training - aimed to train new lesson developers. First pilot postponed to 13th - 16 June with follow up in July. Plan for a second pilot towards the end of the year, then do a train the trainers process. Main objective is to train in collaborative lesson development. Link in notes or email Aleks.

Open day for FORRT event. Not very much known about this beyond link above.

Capentries montly welcome call later this week - see the [schedule](http://pad.carpentries.org/pad-of-pads). Upcomming discussions in May on slack and topicbox.

[CarpentryCon 2022](https://2022.carpentrycon.org/) is happening in August over full weeks in 3 hour blocks in different time zones.

#### Round robin

Jonathan Stoneman: data-driven journalism (there is an official definition on Wikipedia). Jonathan got interested in R and now is teaching journalists getting the stories out of vast amounts of government data. Another things Jonathan is interested in is mentoring and might be a good candiate to approach to be a guest speaker on one of our future calls :-).

Mario - interesting to think about what mentors get out of mentoring.

Alycia - problem with finding instructors became much more difficult with transition to online workshops.

Aleks - transition from training as an instructor to delivering instruction is not a high conversion rate. Maybe 30% (would be interesting to look again at this). Works better if there is a local community. People change jobs.

Matthew - effectivly only has time to teach at own institution. Not easy to claim time. Need line manager approval.

Lucia Michielin: It is also a problem of type of job. On my current job is more difficult to claim time to teach outside the programme I manage so I would probably have to take AL to do that 😅

Ed Bennett: The shift to online has meant everyone has a lot more meetings scattered across their calendar, so being able to commit to a whole workshop is hard. Also one of the incentivesMatthew of delivering central workshops would be expenses-paid travel to interesting places; taking annual leave to sit in the same place on Zoom is less appealing.

Aleks: [RSLondon](https://rslondon.ac.uk/) created an alliance of RSGs in London and South East - it makes it easier to do cross-insituttional teaching as they share workshops and effort

Unsure how frequently instructors need to teach to maintain active instructor status. Only needed to retain voting rights.

Matthew: part of justifications for teaching workshops ourside of one's institution - youa re using a community developed resource and materials and you should teach to the wider community. Colin: you can extend this by saying you are teaching somewhere else and someone else would come to your institution - indirect mutial benefit. Provide expertise elsewhere and get it form someone else.

Jonathan: one of the issues may be having many meetings scattered around diaries. This can make it hard to fit a full session in.

Lucia: We also had difficulties finding instructors though. Even with payment
Yes we primarily preferred people already at Edinburgh University to instruct
Due to ease of paying those.

Aleks: Paying instructors is something we always try to do whenever we can - but the hassle of actually paying instructors through the Uni is quite big and creates a big admin overhead. This should be made easier.

Lucie Wollenstein: But that said - there is a fair amount of interest from the helpers to be certified as Edinburgh does offer payment for some carpentries workshops from funding - so payment does make some interest

Lucia Michielin: Fully agree on the Admin issue. We completely change the way we pay instructors for our programme. We now have people employed on a short hours GH contract for the whole year and then we agree how many actual hours/ training
casually paying people one off was just not sustainable

Colin Sauze: do we need some kind of Carpentries UK company that all instructors can work through and then institutions can bill?

Aleks: Definitely!

Much longer discussion than expected!