- Federal Reserve Board wants SWC/DC workshops for their interns
- they’ve been sent a pre-assessment to help us figure out exactly what
- Instructor training for Compute Canada confirmed for Toronto May 11-12
- Bob Freeman (ACI-REF, Harvard) will come up to help
- ACI-REF wants instructor training at Harvard in June
- were quoted $5K rather than $10K when discussions started
- will hopefully lead to ACI-REF becoming a partner
- Museum of Natural History (London) wants workshops (probably DC not SWC)
- British Library (see item below requiring discussion)
- N8 consortium (northern England) will likely become a partner
- Lead institution for us will be U. Leeds
- Instructor training for them on site Sept 14-15
- XSEDE consortium interested in partnering “somehow”
- have Campus Champions at many US universities
- Email contact with Simons Foundation
- Will have call April 10 - talks about talks about talks
- Self Sufficient Workshop PR
- Assigned: Aleksandra
- PR in Progress
- Discussion Listhost Email About Commercial Workshop
- Assigned: Matt & Katy [see agenda item below]
- Set up a Doodle poll about SC/DC meeting
- Assigned: Greg
- Discuss with Tracy at Cold Spring Harbor
- Touch base after July
- In Person Meeting Timing Doodle Poll
- Assigned: Greg
- 6 people said ‘yes’ to June 12, so weekend of June 13-14 looks good for everyone except Karin
- 6 people said ‘yes’ to June 26 so weekend of June 27-28 looks good for everyone except Adina
- Goal: Toronto the weekend of June 27-28
- Financial Report
- none - JW
Updates only necessary if applicable. It's OK to say "no news from X Subcommittee".
- Fees
- Liaison: Raniere Silva
- Update: Waiting closing the discussion about for-profit workshops.
- Finance
- Liaison: Jason Williams
- Update: Will meet in next two weeks
- Partner Relations / Development
- Liaison: Jason Williams
- Has written charge document
- I would like to motion the SC approve Jonah Duckles and Tom Wright to serve as Chair and Secretary respectively. The have volunteered for these roles as described in the charge. As per that document, I feel the SC should approve them as the will work in a capacity that allows them to speak for SCF provided Greg is in the loop.
- Assessment
- Liaison: Jason Williams
- Update: Daniel Chen and Jeramia Ory to serve as Chair and Secretary respectively. A repo has been started and we are working on a new post-workshop assessment as a starting point
- Mentorship
- Liaison: Raniere Silva
- Update: Ran first meeting and one amazing debriefing session.
- Update: GVW suggests renaming to “Engagement” and will explain why later in the meeting
- Lesson Organization and Development
- Liaison: Matt Davis
- Update: nope
- Communication
- Liaison: Adina Chuang Howe
- Update: nope
- Question: Where to post code snipped for sponsor badge? I think github is actually ok….
- Lead: Matt & Katy & Greg
- There was a discussion about Monsanto and corporations in general having workshops. Greg has written a proposal, and Matt has written an email that will go to Discuss.
- KDH Motion: accept proposal and send out email to Discuss.
The idea is to run a week long consulting workshops for scientific software groups with 3-4 people/group + 1 RSE-style mentor. This will involve some teaching, but mostly consulting.
Comments and thoughts from others:
- Ethan White: people would have to build this into budgets, so would need ~1 year lead time
- Allen Hurlbert: watch the price so that we don't go out of reach for most scientists when NSF is funding 3-4%/year in ecology
- Titus Brown has said that places like the EPA actually find it easier to send employees to expensive workshops than to bring in trainers for cheap ones
- Gus Hart wants some consulting on software practices to help with a large proposal
- GVW is too busy but a great opportunity for highly-skilled instructors connects with the consulting workshops above
Should we try to organize a large number of small workshops for summer students (e.g., NSF REU, NSERC USRA) in May/June? Target a mix of undergrads and grads Try to give new instructors in-class experience.
KH would like to just vote on platforms for communicating. KH has three proposals for verbal communication and dynamic chatting. KH also has three proposals for note-taking.
The process for deciding among each set will follow Robert's Rules' recommendation of repeated balloting.
The options in a group are all proposed simultaneously.
Clarifying questions may be asked.
Additional motions may be proposed.
The motions can be seconded or amended.
The motions can then be discussed.
They will be voted on in reverse order of seconding.
- Motion: We shall use LucidMeetings for note-taking.
- Motion: We shall use Google Docs for note-taking.
- Motion: We shall use Etherpads for note-taking.
- Motion: We shall use LucidMeetings for verbal communication and dynamic chatting.
- Motion: We shall use BlueJeans for verbal communication and dynamic chatting.
- Motion: We shall use Google Hangouts for verbal communication and dynamic chatting.
Meeting minutes will at some point become public, preferably sooner than later. There might be mistakes, misunderstandings, misspellings etc in these notes. The secretary proposes that the notes be submitted in a pull request to the private board repo. All meeting attendees will then actively approve the pull request before the pull request is merged by the secretary. When merged, the notes are considered good to go to the public board repo.
Proposal:
- step 1: secretary makes a pr to board_pvt
- step 2: secretary alerts SC members with @pings
- step 3: SC members have 1 week to respond with changes or +1
- step 4: secretary moves this to the board repo in the public space
Mozilla has sent us an MoU to sign. We sent it back with amendments. They sent that back with their responses. Some issues still exist. It is possible for us to make a motion on acceptance/rejection of the MoU as it stands, however, we are currently waiting to receive changes by the MSL lawyer that should clarify a clause about messaging.
Trevor has made some suggestions as some combination of issues and pull requests. I would like to vote on the ones that require board approval.
- Loss-of-confidence steering committe elections
- I suggested that he propose a policy by pull request. He provided this:
- Motion: Accept this pull request.
From Greg: “James Baker (British Library, also an SSI fellow) … is keen to combine the classes they've been running with our approach (and possibly some of our material) to get Library Carpentry rolling. I think this is a great idea, so I'd like to say "yes", and to suggest that they share instructor training with us (as Data Carpentry does) and do whatever else to avoid duplicating effort. Anyone see a reason not to?
Motion: Support James Baker and Library Carpentry by inviting future Library Carpentry instructors to join our instructor training.
Lead: Greg
How do we deal with translated versions of the curriculum?
Recommend deferring again (haven’t thought about it)
Please note: read these minutes together with the agenda above, sometimes people added notes and comments about things in the agenda before the meeting to ensure a quicker meeting.
Greg Wilson
Katy Huff
Raniere Silva
Matt Davis
Aleksandra Pawlik
Karin Lagesen
Adina Howe
Jason Williams
All good.
Steering Committee group meeting together with Data Carpentry will potentially happen in June.
- Partner Relations/Development
- Motion: approval of Jonah and Tom as Chair/Secretary
- Motion passed
- Mentorship
- Ran debriefing meeting this week, good showup for first meeting, poor showup for evening meeting
- New mentorship committee meeting next week
- Confidential email list (confidential@) has been set up to enable private communication with the mentorship to give people a channel for giving feedback for fellow instructors
- KH suggests widening the subject matter for this email address, and that we should have a document saying what can be sent to it and who receives it.
- KH suggests that mentorship committee should have a different email address for confidential info to mentorship committee.
- RS will send a pull request with a document for how email will be handled.
- GW suggests we rename ourselves to the Engagement Committee. The idea is that we need to do more to connect to the instructorship, we need to target all instructors, not just those that happen to be teaching at present.
- Mentorship committee will discuss this amongst themselves
- Communication
- there is a code snippet to add the sponsors badge
- KH: suggests we ok Matts email to the Discuss list.
- Motion to let Matt send it: passed
- Action: Matt will send email to the discuss list
- Action: Greg and Matt will make sure the proposal for-profit pilot program is included clearly in the current pull request Greg has made on that topic
- Matt/Greg will do a complete rewrite and submit
The idea is to run week long consulting workshops for scientific software groups.
Titus Brown has said that places like the EPA actually find it easier to send employees to expensive workshops than to bring in trainers for cheap ones
Gus Hart wants some consulting on software practices to help with a large proposal
GW: we need more sources for bringing in money. This connects with companies workshops. One proposal is to run week-long workshops. There will be a certain amount lead time for public organizations since they will have to build this into their budgets, for companies there will be less turnaround time. Titus Brown suggests organizing centrally instead, it is easier to send people to somewhere than to get somebody to do something locally. There may be problem with paying instructors for this, instructors may be risking their funding sources. Suggestion: bring this up on lab meeting and get feedback. KL: Would be great to bring this to the instructors. Let them comment and help to point us in the right direction. KH: agrees with KL, suggests bringing a quick writeup for scenarios. Could grant people “scholarships” or “fellowships” in return for teaching these things. Should be much easier to accept and should not hurt people's funding. GW: thinks people who would like to do this who are research support people or thinking of transitioning.
Action: Greg make blog post and bring it up at lab meeting. 24hrs response time on comments on an email draft of that blog post.
NSF REU program for summer students. The idea is to track students that go to that program, see if teaching them early changes what and how they do when regarding graduate programs etc.
GW: propose this to instructors. Jason also suggested we target having these workshops around the same time to make a bigger splash.
GW: will ask for a pair of volunteers from lab meeting next week and see if somebody can be primary email shuffler to this. GW is also taking suggestions.
-
Notetaking:
- LM:
- GD: seconded. Passed
- EP:
-
Verbal:
- LM:
- BJ:
- GH: seconded. Passed
KL want a +1 for everyone that attended the meeting before merge the pull request.
Karin will ping all in this week’s pull request, and will check with personal email.
Motion: accept this proposal. Seconded, passed
MoU send to us. We made comments. They are replying to our comments. Prime persons on this are Katy and Matt, will keep us posted on how this proceeds.
Board issues:
KH: Motion to accept Pull Request 24 on motions of no-confidence, authored by Trevor King: https://github.com/swcarpentry/board/pull/24/files
GW: SSI fellow wants to work with us, wants to have a Library Carpentry kind of thing, British Library would be a great partner. GW can go to London and help them, once he is in the UK. Cannot see a downside. So far this would be a different flavored workshops, not an independent thing. We don't yet know where this will end up, but should join up with them to see where it goes. They will share in our instructor training.
Motion: go forward with collaboration. Seconded, Passed.
Postponed!