Software Carpentry Week in Review Nov 11-17, 2013

1. Mozilla Science Lab Community Call

Over 60 people took part in the Mozilla Science Lab’s first community call on Thursday November 14.  (The number would have been much higher, but Etherpad and our conference call system were having technical problems.)  Darlene Cavalier from SciStarter talked about their work to help people find citizen science projects to get involved with, and Marian Petre presented the results of the code review pilot we conducted with PLOS (which is blogged at here). There was also a good recap of MozFest, which you can read at https://mozillascience.org/mozscience-at-mozfest/, or listen to at http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2013/10/31/episode-211-1st-november-2013/.

2. Software Carpentry Lab Meeting

Our monthly lab meeting ran immediately after the MSL call, and was repeated that evening to accommodate people in later timezones.  We got through several items:

  • We will run a three-day live version of our instructor training course in Toronto on April 28-30, 2014 (post)
  • We’re going to set up a Q&A forum where bootcamp alumni (and others) can ask for help and share ideas (post)
  • We’ve collected a few examples of ways that people cite their work with Software Carpentry in their CVs (post)
  • We’ll be running a workshop on teaching with the IPython Notebook at SIGCSE’14 in Atlanta on March 5, 2014 (post)

We also announced that we’ll be running bootcamps at the recently-announced data science centers, one for women in science and engineering in San Francisco, and of course, our biggest ever at PyCon 2014 in Montreal in April.

3. New Instructors

A dozen new instructors got their badges this week after completing their final online presentations.  Several more are wrapping up in the coming two weeks—see this schedule—and we’ll do a blog post to welcome them all then.

4. In Our Repositories

We merged 8 pull requests on our existing lesson material this week, half a dozen people reviewed the new material for novices that’s in preparation, and there was some animated discussion of new and reorganized lessons on R and plyr.  We’re hoping to wrap up revision of the existing material by the end of November, so that we can tag it as “done” and shift all our effort to the new novice/intermediate lessons.

5. The Art of Cold Calling

We’re always grateful for introductions to potential bootcamp hosts.  If you’ve never approached someone on our behalf, our “Art of Cold Calling” post may be helpful.

6. People Say Nice Things

Jim Manning, who hosted a bootcamp at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute last week, sent us this: “I just want to say that Will and Ross are rock stars. They may have started something big here in Woods Hole, a sort of revolution. They have taught us how to step back from our machines, think about what we are doing, and join forces with our neighbors, We will return to our respective projects on Monday morning in a more efficient and collaborative way. Thank you Software Carpentry.”