# Meeting 28 June 2021

## 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 and encourage collaboration
- to get the community's questions answered and provide help with technical aspects of creating Carpentry workshop websites, registering workshops with the Carpentries, Carpentry institutional membership or anything else
- to help the community in the UK with organising workshops and finding instructors/helpers
- to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment for the community to share their experience, explore topics of interest, find collaborators for training related projects and network.

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

**Regular calls: 4th Monday of the month, 16:00-17:00 UK time.**

**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**

## Useful Links and Resources
- Carpentries UK Community mailing list [local-uk](https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/local-uk)
- **New!!! [uk-carpentries Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/manchester-0zq2478/shared_invite/zt-rut63mzm-mwKXrzi2zfxYuRLFhWKn6w)**
- Carpentries UK Community [Slack channel](https://swcarpentry.slack.com/archives/CLE8WUGMA) within [The Carpentries Slack](https://swc-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/)
- [Carpentries Code of Conduct](https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/policies/code-of-conduct.html)
- Connect with the [general Carpentries community](https://carpentries.org/connect/) - twitter, mailing lists, blog, slack, community calendar
- [Carpentries Handbook](https://docs.carpentries.org/index.html) - a comprehensive resource for all things Carpentries
- [Carpentries workshop FAQ](https://carpentries.org/workshop_faq/)
- [Carpentries Blog](https://carpentries.org/blog/)

## Meeting Minutes
**Time:** 28 June 2021, 16:00-17:00 BST (UTC + 1)

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

**Chair:** Aleks Nenadic

**Timekeeper:** Aleks Nenadic

**Notetaker:** Sarah Stevens

### Agenda
0. Assign notetaker & timekeeper
1. Sign in - 1 min
2. Announcements - 10 min
- Joint call with the Carpentry community from the US Midwest
- Hello and welcome!
- Quick intro from Sarah Stevens, Data Science Facilitator at UW-Madison Data Science Hub and US Midwest community lead
- New [uk-carpentries community Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/manchester-0zq2478/shared_invite/zt-rut63mzm-mwKXrzi2zfxYuRLFhWKn6w)
- We are aware of Slack workspace proliferation - use it as much or as little as you like
- Apologies for notifications some may have received before they were turned off
- Any other announcements from the community?
4. Guest speaker: Toby Hodges, Curriculum Community Developer, The Carpentries - ~30 min - [Toby's slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RI8jnfiLq2oEX40U28qVU1aIcNvDWKq_Ob38_rQgGqY/edit?usp=sharing)
5. Q&A - 15 min
6. Wrap-up/AOB - 5 min

### Sign-in

Name/pronoun if you like/ institution

1. Toby Hodges | he/him/his | The Carpentries | [e-mail]
2. Sarah Stevens (she/her/hers), University of Wisconsin-Madison, [e-mail]
3. Phil Reed | he/him | The University of Manchester | [e-mail] | @PhilReedData
4. Andrew Walker | he/him | University of Oxford | [e-mail]
5. Mateusz Malenta | he/him | The University of Manchester | [e-mail]
6. Mario Antonioletti| he/him/his | SSI/EPCC/ University of Edinburgh | :email: [e-mail]
7. Matthew Bluteau | he/him | UK Atomic Energy Authority | :email: [e-mail] :bird: @mattasdata :octopus: @bielsnohr
8. Colin Sauze | he/him | Aberystwyth University + Supercomputing Wales | [e-mail]
9. Shashank Shekhar Harivyasi | he/him | University of Leeds
10. Jannetta Steyn | she/her | Newcastle University | :email: [e-mail] | :bird: @jannettas | :octopus: @jsteyn
11. Sarah Gibson | she/her | 2i2c | gh: @sgibson91, t: @drsarahlgibson
12. Jamene Brooks-Kieffer | she/her | University of Kansas | :email: [e-mail]
13. Ed Bennett | Swansea University/Supercomputing Wales | [e-mail] | :bird: @QuantumOfEd | :octopus: edbennett
14. Matthew Gillman | UCL | [e-mail]
15. John MacMullen | Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub | [e-mail]
16. Graham Blyth | University of Leeds | [e-mail]
17. Cody Hennesy | he/him | University of Minnesota |[e-mail]
18. Jonathan Stoneman|he/him| freelance datajournalism trainer. [e-mail] (new Carpentries instructor)
19. Nadine Bestard-Cuche | University of Edinburgh
20. David Pérez-Suárez | he-him-his | UCL and SSI Fellow | 🐙🐱@dpshelio 🐦@dvdgc13 🐘@[e-mail]
21. Evgenij Belikov | he-him-his | EPCC, University of Edinburgh
22. Lucia Michielin | University of Edinburgh CDCS (Centre for Data Culture and Society) | she-her | @Lucia-Michielin
23. Juan Herrera | he/him | EPCC, The University of Edinburgh.
24. Jez Cope | he/him | The British Library | :email: [e-mail]; :bird: @jezcope; :elephant: @petrichor:scholar.social; :octopus::fox_face: jezcope
25. Aleks Nenadic | she/her | Software Sustainability Institute | gh: anenadic, t: aleks_nenadic
26. Nilani Ganeshwaran | she/her | The University of Manchester

...(add more as needed)

### Notes

Announcements:
- Joint call with Carpentries Community in the Midwest US
- US announcements
- July - Semester activities for your local Carpentries Community
- Aug - Carpentries at smaller institutions
- UK announcement - from mailing list - new UK Carpentries community slack - Free slack so messages will disappear after 10k messages

Guest Speaker - Toby Hodges - Curriculum Community Developer at the Carpentries

Community Curriculum Development in the Carpentries
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RI8jnfiLq2oEX40U28qVU1aIcNvDWKq_Ob38_rQgGqY/edit?usp=sharing
Learn more about lesson development in The Carpentries https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/lesson_development/index.html
Toby Hodges - [e-mail]

[Open Life Science](https://openlifesci.org/) - Applications currently open

Increasingly promomoting collaborative lesson development in the carpentries
Carpentries have had a open lesson template and talked a little about it in instructor training - folks have been developing their own lesson using the lesson template and publishing them on gh-pages (same as Carpentries lessons)
Wasn't a clear way for those lessons to be shared (used to have etherpad but wasn't widely known or used)
Few years ago, idea for Carpentries incubator - single space for lessons under development by community members could live there (that is where the egg logo is coming from).
Start developing in this space or transfer into the is organization. Place for poeple to find them and work together.
If you have a lesson, that follows the Carpentries CoC and is CC-BY licensed - you are incouraged to transfer your lesson to the Incubator.

Established in curriculum development book a lesson lifcycle - kind of line rather than a cycle - inspired by process of software development and relase

Pre-alpha - proposed and started to be worked on

Alpha - once a lesson is ready to be taught for the first time it is moved to the alpha stage, it is being taught and feedback is gathered by the lesson developers - once they are happy that the feedback has been addressed it moves to beta stage

Beta - Deemed to be ready to be taught by other carpentries instructors with domain knowledge of the topic - Beta tests that give feedback for improvements

After being used by others who are not necessarily taught by people close to the develoment process - the lesson moves to the stable stage.

Stable - lesson can be requested in workshop requests for centrally-requested workshops.

Can't guarentee that Incubator lessons will become offical Carpentries lessons. No guarantee there will be enough community isntructor, as a lesson may be a bit niche.

(Carpentries atom logo) Carpentries Lab - community developed lessons that have been peer reviewed and certified as high enough quailty to be listed there - Working on establishing an open peer review process for moving lessons from incubator to lab

Lesson development study groups - first round in early months this year - idea is to bridge the gap between lesson proposal (lesson idea first come up with) and to the beta stage

Incubator - nearly 90 lessons at present

The 'proposals' repo is pinned - this is the entry to the Incubator where lessons or lesson ideas are submitted.

Lesson template -
- Built for hosting lessons through github pages, with Jekyll
- CC-BY licensed, can be reused and modified as you like with attribution
- infrastructure for exercises, solutions, callouts
- space for isntrucotr notes - relavant for people trying to teach it rather than learn from it
- Focused on accessiblity - increasingly so
- New lesson template focused on accessiblity and ease of use to be released soon.
- Lesson metadata schema in progress

Support for lesson development
- Curriculum Development Handbook [link](https://cdh.carpentries.org/)
- personas/audience profiles
- MCQs examples
- thisngs you may remeber from the Instructor Training
- Lesson maintainer community for support
- monthly co-working session
- monthly meeting
- slack space as well + mailing list (check Carpentries TopicBox for details)
- Also slack space for lesson developers
- Monthly blogpost/newsletter Spotlight to showcase new lessons in development
- what the lesson is and who it is for
- lesson dev. training - developed and led by Toby
- lesson development study groups

Lesson development study groups
- 10 week program (earlier this year)
- Book-club format - reading tasks, with group discussion, and homework tasks
- Go from idea for lesson to some section of it close to the alpha phase
- not realistic to develop a whole lesson from scratch, but a single episode or a section was aimed at
- Main text was curriculum development handbook and the ['Teaching tech together' book](https://teachtogether.tech/) by Greg Wilson
- Learning objectives
- authentic tasks
- maintaining lesson repo and reviewing lessons
- ...
- 4 groups in parallel in the first round of lesson dev. study group, 28 participant initially, 27 completed the programme
- Weekly discussions supported by group facilitator
- 19 new lessons were contrinuted to the Incubator as part of this study group
- Rotated roles among participants to have them lead discussions and act as notetaker (and upload to github)
- Two week break for trial run between sessions 7-8 and collect feedback
- If could change one thing, would have the trail runs not run into spring break/Easter time
- Group facilitators
- Came with experience in lesson development
- Added their experience and answered questions
- Learners were chairing/facilitating the study group calls to give them experience and initiative
- Next steps:
- Demand for training in these skills
- 10 week long book-club style is challenging to scale
- Instructor training easier to schedule as 2 day workshop
- 2 day workshop format is much easier to scale
- Desire for more focused training in feedback from people
- more hands-on taught sessions where more experienced people can demostrated as opposed to reading about it ("seeing it done")
- Trying to make a shorter form version of this training that can be taught in 2 days - Toby currently working on this - hope to pilot in the next few months
- Also looking at establishing co-working sessions to bring a group togteher so they can discuss and ask qeustions
- Also skill up on lesson accessiblity and collaboration
- Also working on lesson review and partnership with journal
- Starting task force for reveiwing how contribtuions are recognized

Get involved!
- Create and contribute to Incubator lessons
- teach lessons in the Incubator
- Join Slack, TopicBox mailing lists, zoom
- maintain a lesson (application to be a maintainer open now ) - https://carpentries.org/blog/2021/06/maintainer_onboarding/
- Send Toby ([e-mail]) an email with questions
- If you are interested in joining for pilot for lesson development training send email to [Toby](mailto:[e-mail])

#### Q & A
- Q: Looked at Carpentries Lab github? Only see one repo? Just opened?
- A: At the moment we only have one lesson that has gone through peer review to be accepted in the Carpentries Lab. But the Carpentries Incubator has a lot of lessons in active development. Some very close to being ready to be reviewed. Put in PR to change it to place for review. Only one there went through peer review separately.
- Follow-up: In lab can be taught in offical carpentries workshop. Also true for incubator?
- A: Not quite. Someone who wants to have a workshop that is teaching an incubator lesson will not be able to request through the carpentries core team (and pay for centrally organized fee) - instead encouraged to reach out to local instructors to teach it. If proper pilot, then reach out to Toby to help make that happen. Imagining in the future, pathway for lessons to become offical lessons will be from the incubator. Example programming in Julia lesson in incubator could become SWC lesson - curriculum advisory committee for SWC would need to do this. Will see how this develops in the future. So lessons in incubator or lab will need to be organized yourself
- Q: Can lessons go backwards as well? If you have a lesson where they've deloped it to alpha, and then the maintainers no longer are making an effort on it. Could it go back?
- A: Talked about retired status. Might have some niche lessons that become outdated if they've not been been updated in several years. Like to caputre when the last updates happened and have offical releases. In terms of moving backwards. Could have a release cycles where you overhaul a lesson and could go back. Not captured in current system, need to think more about it.
- Q: Lessons that are peer reviewed but not official will go into Carpentries Lab but they wouldn't be promoted by central carpentries. Does this mean that if some random person wanted to participate in one of those lessons, there wouldn't be a central place for them to find them?
- A: Good timing to ask. Working on figuring out we can extend the infrastructure for capturing self organized workshops to include incubator/lab lessons. Because we are developing selfcontained websites for these places that could include listing when these are being run.
The Core Carpentries Team cannot gurantee to support any lesson that is developed in this way (other than official ones or which there is sufficient demand). Estabishing a light way of reporting that these new workshops/lessons are being taught. It is not that the Core Team are not supporting these lessons at all but the main effort goes into supporting the official lessons.
- Q:
- A:
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