Attending
Katy Huff Raniere Silva Karin Lagesen Aleksandra Pawlik Maneesha Sane
Not attending:
Greg Wilson Matt Davis Adina Howe Jason Williams
Stuff to read but not discuss:
- We now (Tuesday July 28) have two applicants for the ED position.
We should discuss the ED applicants during the SC in-person meeting in August.
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Co-Executive Director Hire
- Assigned: Greg
- Status: Awaiting applications.
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Back Pay for ED
- Assigned: Greg & Jason
- Status: Deferred to August/September
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Will Program Coordinator (Maneesha Sane) be an employee of NumFOCUS?
- Assigned: Katy
- Status: In conversation. Thought: Maybe Maneesha can handle discussions with Leah on this topic, along with Tracy and further discussions concerning Data Carpentry.
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SSI Proposal:
- Assigned: Greg
- Goal: Work up a proposal to describe the custom proposal for SSI. This will include quantification of the hours they’ve given us already and will include some plan for the instructor trainer training they need for Steve Crouch.
- Status: Have drafted proposal based on discussion at 2015-07-16 meeting; currently being reviewed by Tracy Teal and Neil Chue Hong.
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Training Instructor Trainers
- Assigned: Greg
- Goal: Work up a proposal to describe the plan for creating new instructor trainers. Hopefully it will include estimates of how long it will take to train those folks, the process for training them, the limits on the amount of training (cap or throttle on number of instructors they train) and requirements for quality control (mentoring, followup) they perform as instructor trainers. Also maybe consider discussion of the method by which we’ll select and cap the numbers.
- Current status of this is available in text shared with the committee in the committee github repository
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SCF/DCF Cost Sharing Proposal
- Assigned: Greg
- Goal: Work up a proposal for SCF/DCF cost sharing.
- Status: have requested meeting with Tracy to discuss in week of Aug 3
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CSHL Agenda:
- Assigned: Katy
- Goal: move the CSHL Agenda doc to the GITHUB and send reading material.
- Status: Done
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Maneesha Permissions
- Assigned: Greg
- Goal: add Maneesha to steering committee board. Other stuff? Google Docs?
- Status: Done.
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Google SWOTs form:
- Assigned: Adina & Maneesha
- Goal: make google form with SWOTs and send it to discuss and instructors. Also write blog post to present the background for this. Maneesha will help compile the results from this.
- Status: Google Form sent to Discuss list, and posted on the blog.
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Host Invoice Info Policy
- Assigned: Greg
- Goal: amend webpages to reflect new policy requiring that financial info be sent to SWC before the workshop is coordinated. (Maneesha will reality check the necessary time schedule regarding when this info has to be in, perhaps 2 months, with Amy)
- Status: PR in preparation
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Review Instructor Curriculum Mentorship Plan
- Assigned: Everyone
- Goal: look over and help improve current plan available in google docs, where there are needed details.
- Status: Karin has discussed workthrough proposal with Greg, and will work out a test run of it with actual instructors
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Instructor Curriculum Mentorship Plan
- Assigned: Karin and Greg
- Goal: discuss details of the curriculum mentorship plan for instructors. Identify gaps, issues
- Status:
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MSL Blog Post
- Assigned: Greg
- Goal: revamp the MSL blog post. Introduce Maneesha. Thank Arliss. Point out the facts about MSL.
- Status: Done (http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2015/07/admin-changes.html)
Back pay is still postponed until the Executive Director situation is settled.
Regarding giving Maneesha access to current document archives: we need to sort out what she should have access to, and which archives should be tidied before she has access to them. For instance, she should not have access to info about the applicants of the job she got. ACTION Katy: sort those things out.
SWOTs: have had responses, Maneesha have just had a peek at it, will dig in a bit later.
Updates only necessary if applicable. It's OK to say "no news from X Subcommittee".
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Fees
- Liaison: Raniere Silva
- Update: Working on the Fees Proposal to have something for the in-person meeting.
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Finance
- Liaison: Jason Williams
- Update:
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Partner Relations / Development
- Liaison: Jason Williams
- Update:
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Assessment
- Liaison: Jason Williams
- Update:
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Mentorship
- Liaison: Raniere Silva
- Update: Continue running the debriefing session. Noam Ross suggested on Twitter that instructors help each other to learn new tools and we will discuss that next week.
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Lesson Organization and Development
- Liaison: Matt Davis
- Update: None
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Communication
- Liaison: Adina Chuang Howe
- Update:
Regarding fees: the fees committee is working on a new text, incorporating current changes to the fee structure. We should have something about fees, discounts and the like at the in-person meeting. ACTION Katy: add this to in-person meeting agenda..
Regarding the in-person meeting, we need more info about where to go and how to get there.
ACTION Katy: get info from Jason about how to do practicalities around in-person meeting.
The mentorship committee is contemplating setting up an event focusing on instructors helping other instructors learn new tools and dig in into new lessons. Katy mentioned Hacker Within. Might draw that in.
ACTION: Raniere: invite Katy for next Mentorship meeting to help with Noam request.
Lead: Katy
Topic: Tracy Teal and Data Carpentry rely on SCF to train instructors. Due to our current interest in focusing on instructor retention rather than the creation of new instructors, she has found it hard to manage the instruction needs of Data Carpentry without the opportunity to train new instructors. Tracy is aware of the current requirements for instructor training, has taught instructor training three times, and would like to do so with the people she has hand-picked as potential Data Carpentry instructors. However, she currently is restricted by the bylaws, where instructor training is delineated as the realm of the SCF ED only.
Motion: When Tracy Teal would like to train instructors she has selected for Data Carpentry, she should simply propose a number of instructors (or a list of names) to the Steering Committee. The committee can then either approve or disapprove that training. No involvement from the Executive Director is needed except to keep Tracy aware of the most up-to-date requirements for instructor training.
Data Carpentry, as per agreement, relies on SCF for educating its instructor pool. However, DC have too few instructors and they need more, but they have to wait a long time to be trained due to a backlog in the SCF training setup. Tracy has done instructor training together with Greg, so she could do training A related problem is that it is right now a bit difficult to keep track of who gets trained and why and when. Thus it is also difficult to push certain people forward in the queue.
At the moment we have four instructor training sessions planned for fall/early next year. All of these are in person, none online, and they are all training for partners as per partner agreements. In many ways we are inadvertently moving towards institution focused training. Due to these factors it is not not possible to add people for DC in these training sessions. We need a track for individuals, i.e. non-partner people. We do have the online training program, but that has a big waiting list and is only run once a year.
Motion: Tracy be allowed to do instructor training as long as she does it with heads up to us and complies with current requirements, and at a maximum of 30 people this year (2015). If she wishes to teach more, we will re-evaluate.
Seconded. Passed.
This motion was amended due to discussions later in the meeting (see text below): normally SCF gets paid for this training. SCF should receive no less than ⅓ of the revenue from such a training.
After this, we decided we should talk to DC first, to get their opinions on it. This was thus deferred to after such a discussion.
ACTION Greg: discuss this proposal with Tracy, and include this in cost sharing proposal.
Lead: Aleksandra
Background: This came up in discussion with Southampton Uni. They want to be an affiliate but they also asked how much is instructor training for
a) an individual working for organisation who is not a partner/affiliate
b) organisation interested in sending 3-4 people to instructor training but that organisation is not partner/affiliate
Greg’s suggestion: either they pay $10K for an instructor training event, or they become an affiliate or partner, or they wait for a slot in the next free online course (which may mean a year or more).
We don’t have a scheme for paying for small sets of people to do training. However, there is quite a price gap between free online instructor training, and institution organized partner training (10K).
We should consider have something in between. We could go for something around for instance 500 dollars per instructor. We should also consider the amount of administrative overhead such a training would incur: the host (normally a partner or affiliate) will handle most of the organization for instructor training (flights and hotel) and if we organize something local we will have to do that work and because of this we should possibly charge something more.
Moreover, we should possibly go through how we select people to participate in the online training. Right now, it is on a first come first served basis, which makes it difficult to bump people from specific regions or specific fields.
Decision: bring this up on in-person meeting.
ACTION Katy: add this to the agenda for the in person meeting.
Lead: Greg (in absentia)
Topic: Instructor training for librarians in Vancouver in October
Tracy Teal has been in touch with a group of librarians who would like instructor training in Vancouver in October:
From Tracy: "I was talking with Steven Van Tuyl, the Data and Digital Repository Librarian at Oregon State, and the idea came up of running a Train the Trainers associated with the Digital Library Federation meeting in Vancouver in October.http://www.diglib.org/forums/2015forum/
The idea is that many of the people who are qualified and interested in being instructors would be at the meeting, so it would be a great place to get a bunch of librarians trained at once. They know the cost is $10,000 for the T3. If we do get Moore funding, we have some money written in for T3 for SWC, so we could pitch in some of this money to keep the cost down. They checked and could get some space at UBC for this event. I could be one of the T3 instructors."
She could lead the training, and we could ask Christina Koch (UW Madison) to assist; it would give us people in a domain we’re currently light on, but we’d need to figure out revenue sharing between DC and SWC.
Motion:
We have the opportunity to organize a domain specific T3 for librarians, done by Tracy. However, we would have to figure out who gets the money for the training that Tracy does. Nominally, SCF should get any monies for T3, but in this we would do some sort of revenue sharing. This discussion resulted in amending agenda item # 3 (see above).
Note: Aleksandra left the meeting at this stage due to technical reasons, so we did not after this point have a quorum. Hence, no voting on issues following this one was done.
Lead: TBD (Greg probably can’t make the meeting)
Topic:
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At our last meeting, we discussed the issue of non-instructors posting instructor requests on the Discuss list. This was generally seen as increasing the noise-to-signal ratio on that list and should not be encouraged.
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However, it also raised the question of when someone can be allowed to
- post to the instructor list looking for instructors
- post to the etherpads looking for instructors
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Issues that were raised:
- Karin preferentially teaches at workshops that were “paid for” because others aren’t directly benefitting the SCF
- Katy, however, sees self-organized workshops as still being beneficial to SCF
- The people associated with affiliate organizations may be acting as their organization’s “admin” because they are contractually obligated to organize workshops without the help of admin@softwarecarpentry as part of their affiliateship. So, it’s important not to put barriers in their way, as it would result in very upset partners/affiliates.
Question: where does everyone draw the line?
We believe we have workshops falling into one of three groups:
- fee paying
- partner organized workshops
- independent self-organized workshops
- organized by SCF instructor
- organized by random
Karin doesn’t see anything wrong with people connecting with other instructors as long as it is flagged where they are coming from. That way she knows if she is donating her time to SCF or to another institution.
Katy thinks that when she is teaching for independent self-organized workshops organized by SCF instructors as still donating her time to SCF. For independent self-organized workshops organized by random people this isn’t as much the case.
One possible suggestion is to require all workshops seeking instructors to inform which category they fall in.
An additional question is whether calls for instructors should only be on instructor list, or also on discuss list. Instructor list is moderated. In this context it should be noted that somebody might think that something on the instructor list would always be fee-paying/partner.
Raniere says he prefers not having instructor requests on the discuss list. It’s out of scope. (Katy agrees).
Suggestion: disallow this on discuss, opening up instructor list for this, have people flag what kind of workshop they are. Additionally, potentially ask the Program Coordinator to bundle them into a weekly digest (unless they’re extremely urgent.)
Lead: Greg (not attending)
Topic: Greg had a call a couple of months ago with Rudy Magyar from Sandia National Laboratory, who wanted us to train some of their staff as instructors. He wasn't interested in having them teach our regular workshops - instead, he wanted them to use our teaching techniques to deliver their own in-house material (some of which covers sensitive topics, and therefore can't be taught by outsiders).
Unfortunately, what didn't get communicated is that instructor training is more expensive than a regular workshop, and requires a lot more to schedule. Rudy went ahead and got approval to spend $3450 on a class (a figure he calculated based on $1250 for a regular workshop admin fee and $1100 each for two instructors). We only realized the mistake last week, at which point Greg also found out that the money has to be spent by September 18 (their year end). Neither Aleksandra nor Tracy nor Greg can do it in person by then, so Greg proposes that he run a two-day online event for them like the ones run for NIH and Arizona. This is less than the price we're now quoting, but:
a) Greg thinks the national labs are an important strategic partner, so playing nice with them is likely to pay dividends down the road,
b) the mistake is at least half Greg’s, and two afternoons+evenings in September seem like a fair response, and
c) it will give Greg a chance to try out some new material in front of a small audience.
Motion: Allow Greg to run a two-day online event for 3450 to train 6-10 instructors for Sandia to run in-house workshops.
There are many National Labs in the country; while the Labs are important, we do need to ensure that we use Greg’s time appropriately. If the miscommunication was purely a misreading of the website on their part, we should consider whether we want to prioritize this over other things.
Lead: Greg (in absentia)
Topic: minor changes to Maneesha Sane’s contract
- Contract currently reads:
Payments to be made to Contractor pursuant to this Agreement shall be from funds raised by the Parties for the Software Carpentry Project. Each Party shall use reasonable business efforts to raise funds for the Software Carpentry Project.
Maneesha commented:
The first paragraph of the contract notes that the terms "the Parties" or "each Party" refer to the contractor (me) & NumFocus. This makes it sound like I am (at least partly) responsible for raising funds for this position. While some of my work may indirectly be tied to fundraising (such as collecting & analyzing data on workshops), we never discussed fundraising as a key part of this position.
Greg agreed, and suggested that the wording be amended to:
Payments to be made to Contractor pursuant to this Agreement shall be from funds raised by the Software Carpentry Foundation.
- Contract currently reads:
If no Project Funds are available, then NumFOCUS is not required to pay any amounts to Contractor, notwithstanding anything to the contrary elsewhere in this Agreement, until Project Funds become available. Within five (5) days of an inquiry by Contractor, or NumFOCUS' receipt of any invoice from Contractor, NumFOCUS agrees to inform Contractor if the invoice cannot be paid, or can only be partially paid, due to insufficient Project Funds.
Maneesha commented:
This makes it sound like if funding runs out, I may not be informed until I submit my next invoice or until I specifically ask. Is there any way to keep abreast of funding issues in advance?
Greg suggests that the contract be amended so that the Program Coordinator gets the same monthly financial statements that the Steering Committee gets (which just seems sensible anyway, since we’re relying on her to check them against workshops run).
Motion: approve changes to Program Coordinator’s contract.
Maneesha should know about our finances, and should not be required to do fundraising.
Request sounds reasonable. We can’t vote on it now, but maybe an email vote would be appropriate to get it ironed out immediately.