As we entered the second year of the Trainers Leadership Committee, we had most administrative and procedural systems established, allowing us to start focussing more on delivery to the Trainer community. Our current goal is to increase Trainer engagement and retention, and towards this, our main activities over the last six months have been changes to enhance the value of Trainer meetings, and to streamline the Trainer status renewal process.
We want to encourage more Trainers to submit topics for discussion at Trainer meetings, and also aim to make these meetings more Trainer-centric by having them hosted by members of the community rather than a member of the core team. To support this, we developed a GitHub-based system for submission of topics to for discussion at Trainer Meetings, and added functionality to assign meeting hosts to topics and dates through this system.
- Use this repo's issue list for potential Trainer Meeting topics
- Use a Table-style Project on this repo for trainer meeting topic assignment
We worked with the Director of Instructor Training to develop and implement an updated and partly-automated process for Trainer status renewal. As a result of this update, 35% of trainers who were due for renewal retained Active status automatically from data within AMY, without any need to provide input themselves. A further 35% were renewed on review by the Committee and the Director of Instructor Training, based on activities self-reported through an updated questionnaire. Only 30% required further follow-up; of these, over half were transferred to Alumni (non-active) Trainer status anyway, either at their own request or because they were not contactable or did not respond to messages.
As part of the review process, we identified additional criteria which will be used to further increase the number of fully automatic renewals in future, and we made improvements to the self-certification questionnaire which should reduce the number of cases requiring follow-up.
We provided input into a project by the Director of Assessment to review and update Instructor checkout requirements; this included evaluating and providing feedback on an initial list of proposed changes. The Trainers Leadership Committee has the remit to approve changes to the checkout procedure, and we will continue to work with the Director of Assessment to finalise and implement these updates.
To encourage more Instructors to teach centrally-organised workshops, we approved the addition of a commitment to teach centrally-organised workshops to the list of current recruitment push criteria for Instructor training applicants.
We formally assigned the task of writing biannual Executive Council reports to the Committee chair, and implemented GitHub automation to assist this process
We formalised the process for reaching a quorum for voting on proposals, agreeing that if a quorum is not reached at the meeting itself, proposals will be voted on asynchronously using GitHub issue comments.
We are recognised by the Executive Council as a Carpentries Committee, but legacy references remained in the Carpentries repository and Handbooks with a variety of other titles. All such references which could be identified were updated so that the roles and responsibilities of the committee are unambiguously provided in Carpentries information resources.
As mentioned above, we will continue to support the Checkout review project. We will also continue our focus on community building, working to identify further ways to support local Trainer communities.