Meeting - 20 May 2024 (instead of 27 May - Bank Holiday in the UK)

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.

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 and The Carpentries community calendar.

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

Meeting Minutes

  • Chair: Phil Reed
  • Timekeeper:
  • Notetaker: Mario Antonioletti

Agenda

  1. Assign notetaker & timekeeper
  2. Sign in & ice-breaker
  3. Review of actions
  4. Announcements
  5. Guest speaker + Q&A
  6. Instructor Training checkout questions
  7. Wrap-up/AOB

Actions

  • Phil to talk to Aleks about transitioning old lessons to the new format
  • Phil to talk to Aleks about revitalising the chairing session rota

Sign-in

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

  1. Juan Herrera, he/him, EPCC (The University of Edinburgh)
  2. Mario Antonioletti, he/him, EPCC/SSI University of Edinburgh
  3. Andrew Walker / he/him / University of Oxford
  4. Colin Sauze, he/him, National Oceanography Centre
  5. Phil Reed, he/him, The University of Manchester
  6. Michael Tso, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

Notes

Michael was new to the group so we did a round of introductions.

There was a discussion of Jean Baptiste's OtterPilot as an attendeewith the message:

Jean Baptiste added Jean Baptiste's Assistant to the meeting.

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Two actions from last month - the date of the meeting was changed and the other action by Dimitrios was also done.

CarpentryConnect is happening in Heidelberg in the second week of Nov. Phil Reed is going. He is giving a presentation. There is going to be a hybrid joining option. It is jointly hosted by BioNT.

This is a local event. Registrations open on June 17th. Something to keep an eye on.

Quick review of Collaboration Workshop 24: 30 Apr-2May

  • University of Warwick hybrid event, around 80 people in total.
  • Different from earlier SSI events, further departure to wider group of institutions.
  • Three themes, worked connected well (green computing, AI, citizen science).

Talked about the hack which Colin, Mario and Andrew participated in - a miniHPC platform based on Raspberry Pis.

Talked about generative AI and problems with it. Collaborations Workshop is an annual event - the next one has not been decided yet.

Michael was also there and he enjoyed his time at CW too.

Phil asked if anyone would like to talk about at a future event and the types of topics that people would like to hear about.

  • Setting up sites for Workshops and change up to the new lesson workbench (Andrew)

Converting an existing set of lessons - looking for automated tools to do this. Do they exist?

Andrew: need best practice for courses that are only available to specific groups, e.g. PhD students. This information is not always captured in the Carpentry records. There would be a mutual benefit to do this. Also, how much variation is acceptable for it to be called a Carpentry course.

The Carpentry survey is very generic which has a lot of replication - if you attend several workshops you will have to fill a lot of information a lot of which is not pertinent. You want a centrally configurable survey which you can add bits to it. Also, the results are not always useful for the instructor.

To summarise

  • What constitutes a recorded Carpentry session?
    • These courses may not fully open, e.g. DTPs
    • It would allow the Carpentries to show impact
  • Can the surveys be made more customisable?

Could possibly take this to Carpentry connect.

What lessons are being developed? How do you find what is already out there? Is there a lesson audit out there? Would people find this useful?

e.g. git for those that do not code, e.g. generating documentation, etc.

There was a case where people wanted to follow a course that did not require the command line but could use GitHub instead. There may be such a course from UCL.

Try to distribute the chairing rota. We are updating the Chairing meetings document again.

We should also refactorise the internal documentation which is proving hard to find, e.g. chairing rotas, volunteer presentations, …

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