Summary
In the first six months, we have focused on getting up and running. We established protocols for working publicly to maintain high transparency and we started our work on outstanding matters: governance, the trainer agreement, and IT Curriculum Maintainance. Going forward, we'll continue on these matters mostly with the goal of setting up for the next 1 year term to be a more visionary period with more basic matters settled and functional working practices in place.
We used the first sessions of the Leadership meetings to outline how this new Leadership group should function. We adopted a variation on Martha's Rules for running our meetings, and developed a procedure for taking and sharing minutes that prioritizes transparency and openness. We elected to do most of our work in GitHub, and have set up a number of templates for issues and pull requests to improve ease of use and to encourage discussion and feedback in this medium.
- Clarify scope and procedure of the trainer rules
- Trainer Leadership Minutes Procedure
- Use milestones to assign items to meetings
- Use issue templates and discussions to manage conversations
In 2020, the Trainer community raised concerns about the language in the updated Trainer agreement, in particular the requirement to meet a specified number of units. To avoid a similar situation occurring again, the Trainer leadership team proposed forming a working group to formalise the consultation and feedback process around future agreement updates. The group prepared terms of reference and a timeline for this project, and sought members from the community to make up the working group. Unfortunately there was minimal response to this call, and in light of this and other activities around updating the agreement, the working group was not formed. Instead, the Trainers leadership group will work directly with the Director of Instructor Training to review future agreement versions.
- Trainers Agreement Update Process Working Group
- Create Trainer Agreement Update Process Working Group
- Timeline for trainer agreement update, ratification, and renewal
We are in the process of outlining a process for making changes to Trainer Checkout. This document would specify what kinds of changes can be made by which groups, and when decisions require a vote by the Trainer Community. Currently we are identifying stakeholders for various parts of the checkout process, and working to determine who would own the Checkout Governance.
We have also outlined goals for policy on how the curriculum should be maintained to clarify how the maintainers of the curriculum and trainers at large interact.
We also are working to establish a subcommittee to govern demo lessons, to both keep the list up to date and clarify to make the maintainance more explicit.
- Create a policy for Checkout process governance
- Establish a subcommittee for approved demo lessons
- Create a Policy for IT curriculum maintainence
- Remove Policy from the IT curriculum to simplify maintainance
Regularly scheduled bi-monthly meetings of Carpentries Trainers may fall on a major holiday, reducing participation by the trainers community. We created a process for canceling meetings and described responsibilities for cancellations and notifications.
We are in the process of formalizing how the panel will communicate with the trainer community in multiple ways. Most formally, we will create a process for RFCs, designed to enable more asynchronous engagement. We have attempted to engage with trainers a few times with little success, so we are going to try using trainer meetings in new ways as well.