# Meeting - 26 June 2023

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## Meeting Info

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 & upcoming meetings](https://hackmd.io/V3ReKkEESzqyCNxWJdulOw#Meeting-Notes)
- [Meeting notes template](https://hackmd.io/hgl1tYhOTTqDsIDwjArE5w)
- [Chairing rota](https://hackmd.io/@local-uk/rkPK1Si7F)
- [Guest speaker sign-up](https://hackmd.io/@local-uk/rkkzBTLOd)

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

## Meeting Minutes

- **Chair:** Aleks Nenadic
- **Timekeeper:** Mario Antonioletti
- **Notetaker:** Mario Antonioletti

### Agenda
0. Sign-in
1. Assign the chair, notetaker & timekeeper
2. Announcements
- RS London East 2023 workshop https://rslondon.ac.uk/rslondonsoutheast2023/
- RSEconf https://rsecon23.society-rse.org/ and a satellite event on training - https://rsecon23.society-rse.org/satellite-events/
4. Instructor Training checkout questions
5. **Guest speaker + Q&A:** Matthrew Bluteau presenting on the **[RSE Competencies Toolkit project](https://github.com/RSEToolkit/rse-competencies-toolkit)** aimed at helping RSEs identify skill and competencies they need, finding the learning pathways to plan their learning and find the training resources.

### Sign-in

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

1. Yasel Quintero (she/her) / checkout / TU Delft, Netherlands
2. Neil Shephard / The University of Sheffield (checkout)
3. Matthew Bluteau, he/him, UK Atomic Energy Authority, :octopus: @bielsnohr :elephant: @[e-mail]
4. Colin Sauze, he/him, National Oceanography Centre
5. Mario Antonioletti (he/him), EPCC/SSI, University of Edinburgh
6. Aleks Nenadic, she/her / Software Sustainability Institute
7. Eilis Hannon, she/her, University of Exeter
8. Samuel Lewis, he/him, AstraZeneca (checkout)
9. Dave Horsfall, he/him, Newcastle University
10. Sarah Jaffa / she / UCL, London
11. Lucia Michielin / she / Centre for Data, Culture, & Society (Edinburgh University)

### Notes

Aleks welcomed people to the call.
This was followed by a round of introductions as there were quite a lot of new people on the call.
People talked about announcements (see above).
CW proposal has been resubmitted to RSECon. Looking for volunteers from instructors. RSLondon are running an event on the 17th July (https://rslondon.ac.uk/rslondonsoutheast2023/).

Link for RSECon - https://rsecon23.society-rse.org/ (satellite event on training - https://rsecon23.society-rse.org/satellite-events/)

People on checkout were asked if they had any questions on instructor checkout.

Question about what to do if not all the material is covered:

- Point people to the notes if it is not covered.
- Different strategies are coverd depending on the material that is covered - some courses have dependencies and it is important to cover these.
- There are recordings of people that have covered the course they can be pointed to. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMH8s0eChDg&list=PLu7d3po48tBobUSZ3dvFScMBD2oDp-CtQ)
- If you have time, you can rearrange an extra session.
- Times are suggested, most people do not always cover the material in the time.
- Less is more - don't try to cram everything in - be judicious.
- Some moved away from doing the workshop back-to-back but spread it out over several weeks to get more time to assimilate the material.

- A recording of the unix shell lesson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMH8s0eChDg&list=PLu7d3po48tBobUSZ3dvFScMBD2oDp-CtQ

Lesson materials - some people use slides, how others share the notes. What do people do?

- Humanities and social sciences expect slides. Preparing slides will also take time.
- Do not show the Carpentry notes - only share a terminal window and use a whiteboard. It would be good for people to share their slide decks for people to re-use.
- Ask on the Carpentry chat/mailing list if someone has already produced slides for a particular course.
- Slides are good for the conceptual part of courses. Move to the Carpentries workbench has an instructor view.
- The Carpentries material is not really intended to be shared during live coding.
- Get the helpers to type in code on to the shared pad to allow people to keep up.

Examples are sometimes tied to a particular IDE - i.e. pycharm while people use vs studio - are there variants of a course that use screenshots of other IDEs?

- example of intermediate python using vs code as opposed to pycharm https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/python-intermediate-development/vscode/index.html
- The foundational Python courses an IDE is not used but for the intermediate Python course an IDE has been used.
- Use an virtual IDE for remote course is one of the recommendations - it avoid installation issues.
- Counter argument is that you want people to be left with a working environment after they leave as a course.
- Setting time aside at the beginning for installation problems helps.
- Even if you set time to do this people will still arrive on the day with installation problems.

Matthew gave a presentation on the "RSE Competencies Toolkit".
https://rsetoolkit.github.io/rse-competencies-toolkit ([Github](https://github.com/RSEToolkit/rse-competencies-toolkit)).

Questions on the roles that are used and is there going to be any on-boarding?

For roles - keeping it broad, can create a profile for what you want and then develop a competency profile for it and generate examples, what a senior RSE looks like. Developers are interested how this applies to specific domains. Currently it is a jekyll web-site so fairly static, may have to move to a more dynamic framework.

Would welcome feedback from the community regarding competencies.

Domain specific or generic competencies - interest from the digital humanities for such tooling.

Answer: both.