---
layout: single
title: "2019-04-30 Board Meeting"
menu: "main"
date: 2019-04-30
excerpt: "#TODO"
---

## Attendees
* Chair: Hao
* Secretary: Gaurav
* Board Members: Joe, Elise, Geraldine
* Non-board Members: Alethea Geiger, Adam Rivers, Daniel Maxwell, Dimitri Bourilkov

## Agenda
- Approve last week's minutes - UF-Carpentry/website#35
- Status of travel awards
- Status of logo design
- TREC workshop (currently underway)
- Biodiversity Research Workshop (2019, May 7)
- ResBas planning
- coordination with other groups (UF Libraries, UF DSI, UF Innovation Hub, Gainesville R-Ladies, ??)
- Long-term community building strategy
- Long-term workshop schedule
- UF/USDA workshop (August?)
- Funding for Carpentries membership renewal
- IFAS support for future REC workshops
- Need-based scholarship / fee reduction
- Backup laptops for workshop attendees
- Social media / website guidance
- chair and secretary for next meeting (May 14)

## Notes
- Approve last week's minutes - UF-Carpentry/website#35
- Approved
- Status of travel awards (Joe)
- Only one submission, to be reviewed and approved/rejected soon
- Maybe the criteria is too restrictive? (only 23 people were eligible)
- Maybe we should revise the cutoffs?
- Maybe because its finals week?
- Or because it was after people had already planned and funding summer travel
- We should aim to get the travel awards out earlier
- Maybe for long-term sustainability, we should avoid board members taking all the instructor slots
- Status of logo design (Elise)
- We should be aware about UF's rules on branding
- Discussions on Slack, we'll vote on it next time
- There's someone in the University Relations office who we can e-mail to ask about our logos
- TREC workshop (currently underway)
- Looks like it's going well!
- Biodiversity Research Workshop (2019, May 7) (Geraldine, Gaurav)
- Next week!
- Agreed on how to shorten the curriculum
- Need to check what's going on with the location and the food
- We need to organize curricum-specific training tips
- Gaurav will work on this
- ResBas planning (Hao, Joe, Elise)
- coordination with other groups (UF Libraries, UF DSI, UF Innovation Hub, Gainesville R-Ladies, ??)
- Hao has [written a document](https://hackmd.io/LSW0ANWeRgKu-PNuEFWQ_w)
- Part of the [Research Bazaar 2019](https://resbaz.github.io/resbaz2019/)
- We plan to set up a task force to deal with this
- Hao would also like to organize more social events around computing
- Melissa Rethlefsen ([e-mail]) at the UF Health Sciences Library is organizing a conference in March 2020 and is looking for people to get in touch with to discuss (including specifically UF Carpentries), and Daniel Maxwell ([e-mail]) is happy to make this connection.
- Long-term community building strategy
- Long-term workshop schedule (Adam Rivers)
- USDA got funding to do a workshop on Machine Learning
- Funds to bring in around 30 people, have people around the US who can
- Using the Google TensorFlow two-day crash course as a template
- Don't really have a great space to do this workshop in their facility
- Workshop materials are not yet set, and Google's materials might focus on non-scientific problems (e.g. clicks), so they might adapt the material to scientific problems.
- Lots of short video lectures, but Adam would prefer people covering that material in person
- Needs to happen before the fiscal year end in Sep 30, so they're aiming for August, but as late as maybe Sep 10
- Might want to coordinate with [NSF Center for Big Learning](http://nsfcbl.org/); they might have students interested in very qualified.
- Might be structured similarly to a previous workshop they ran on metagenomics
- TensorFlow has short lessons (three minutes talking, three minutes doing), so it might be adapted to Carpentries somewhat earlier.
- Using a easier frontend like Keras
- Adam to create an issue on our wiki and we'll follow up on that
- UF/USDA workshop (August?)
- Funding for Carpentries membership renewal (Geraldine)
- Usually it's 15K for gold membership
- IFAS seems very key to spend their money before the end of the financial year, but they're discussing this internally at the moment
- How do we do priority registration with IFAS, given the huge number of people they have?
- We presented IFAS with a menu, and they seemed to be interested in all of the options.
- Geraldine is still working on the statistics to look at departmental representation at UF Carpentry workshops.
- Why not just do a focussed workshop for each organization? Because otherwise that might be all the workshops we do in the year, and we really want to do open workshops.
- Given how much of a success the EPI workshop was, we should approach them to see if they want to be part of this.
- We get $3750 from UFII.
- Current plan: we open half the seats early and then all the sponsoring groups get an e-mail telling them to register.
- Geraldine will try to get the data on how much each organization has benefited from UF Carpentries, which will be a valuable part of that pitch
- IFAS support for future REC workshops
- Need-based scholarship / fee reduction
- Our next workshop is free anyway, but a couple of months before our next paid workshop is the latest when we should sort this out.
- So this decision needs to boe made next meeting.
- The money is available, so it would be nice to do it.
- Assessing the need will be tricky.
- Maybe a letter from the advisor saying that alternate funding is not available?
- What about doing it randomly?
- We hold two seats and make a list of people who can't afford the registration fee, and then pick them randomly.
- We don't have a sense of how many people are actually being turned away by this.
- Backup laptops for workshop attendees
- Ethan White has two unused laptops lying around the lab
- As long as we're willing to wipe them and
- You could use Marston Science Library Room L308 (seats 25), set up with R, Python, not sure about Git Bash -- but Academic Technology could install anything we need.
- One problem: we want to encourage students to bring their own laptops, so this would really be just be for people who run into problems
- We probably need to book this room around a month in advance
- Social media / website guidance
- R Ladies guidelines are pretty straightforward and common sense
- It would be nice if everybody has access to Twitter, so it's easier for instructors to link
- Gaurav to write this up #TODO
- The site is pretty dynamic now: we should link to the events straightaway on the main page
- A link to the page with the statistics would be useful!
- chair and secretary for next meeting (May 14)
- Elise will be secretary next
- We need a chair

## Action items
- Next board meeting, we should have our plans for asking the funding organizations for money to fund our membership renewal.