Proposal for UFII funding 2018
The UF Carpentry Club offers low-cost 2-day workshops in data analysis and informatics skills for the entire UF community including students, staff, and faculty. These workshops have a demonstrated impact on improving learners' ability to analyze and manage data as well as increase confidence in programming ability. We are seeking $3,750 in August 2018 to fund the annual renewal of the Carpentries organization membership for UF.
Requested amount: $3,750
Total budget: $15,000
The UF Carpentry Club offers workshops spanning a variety of data analysis and informatics topics, including the Unix shell, version control, data management, and R and Python programming. Logistics and overall organization of the workshops is handled by the Board, composed of 7 elected members. The board meets regularly, with meetings open to the public, and meeting minutes posted online at the Carpentry Club's website (https://www.uf-carpentry.org/minutes/). Members of the board are elected at the start of each fall semester. Current board members are: Matthew Collins, Justin Millar, Simona Picardi, Kristina Riemer, Brian Stucky, Miao Sun, and Hao Ye.
The UF Carpentry Club plans to offer at least 6 informatics workshops per academic year (3 per semester) in addition to 1 instructor training workshop per year. Each 2-day workshop is typically held in the UF Informatics Institute classroom, and covers multiple topics. Planned topics for workshops in the 2018-2019 academic year will include: “Data Organization in Spreadsheets”, “Data Cleaning with OpenRefine”, “Data Management with SQL”, “Data Analysis and Visualization in R”, “Data Analysis and Visualization in Python”, “The Unix Shell”, “Version Control with Git”. The Carpentry Club Board is soliciting input on offering additional topics, such as lessons developed for Social Scientists, Libraries, and for working with Geospatial Data and we expect to teach new topics in the coming year.
Since 2016, there have been 15* workshops with a total of 342 participants (average workshop size = 22.8). Participants have come from ~100 different UF departments, labs, and even groups external to UF (e.g. other local universities, visiting scholars, federal, state and local agencies). Graduate students form the bulk of our audience with over 52% of attendees. Staff, faculty, and outside participants are all well represented with 11% - 13% each. While we do not have feedback specifically from UF, a survey of Carpentries workshops worldwide found substantial improvements in programming skills and confidence, with ~75% of attendees recommending these workshops for others (https://carpentries.org/blog/2018/07/evidence-impact/).
In addition to building capacities on our Gainesville campus, our organization is also focused on contributing to the broader data science and informatics community. A board member represented UF at the inaugural CarpentryCon conference last June, where we connected with the handful of similar community groups at other universities. This past year we also participated in a world-wide work session for Carpentries curriculum development and ran a workshop at the UF Ft. Lauderdale Research and Education Center (FLREC). In 2017 our instructors participated in the first Data Carpentry held at Florida State University.
Workshop fees are currently $46 per student for two days of training, which includes lunch and snacks on both days. We are able to offer workshops at this highly competitive rate because all our instructors, helpers, and Board members are volunteers and the UF Informatics Institute provides in-kind staff support for catering and financials.
The Club manages UF's annual $15,000 membership in the Carpentries organization. This membership supports the Carpentries' development of lesson materials, gives us access to one instructor training workshop per year, and helps sustain the international Carpentries organization.
We are requesting $3,750 in support from the UFII towards this annual fee for the August 2018 - August 2019 period. Other portions of this budget are provided by iDigBio, UFBI, and the White Lab.
- excluding the most recent workshop (June 25-26, 2018)