Data Carpentry Steering Committee Meeting Report

September 8, 2016
1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern

Attendance

Steering committee members:
Present: Karen Cranston, Hilmar Lapp, Aleksandra Pawlik (arrived ~4:30), Ethan White
Absent: Karthik Ram

Others present:
Exec. Director: Tracy Teal

Proceedings

Report on workshops:
Workshops since Jan 1, 2016: 56
Workshops since last meeting: 6
Breakdown: 2 paid (Edinburgh, SUNY Stonybrook); fee waiver (South Africa, Rhode Island); fee waiver partner (Oregon State, Univ of Wisconsin) First workshop in Korea scheduled in November. Deputy Director of Assessment will be there for a conference and will observe and teach the intro section. Workshop details

Report on partnerships:
New partnerships: University of Wisconsin

Publications:
Good Enough Practices paper on arXiv (add link) Williams and Teal: A Vision for Collaborative Training Infrastructure for Bioinformatics https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3807723

Presentations:
Zotero is being updated with all our presentations: https://www.zotero.org/groups/datacarpentry/items

Report on milestones:

  • Policy for missed workshops approved by members of Data Carpentry Steering Committee. Now will bring to SWC SC.
  • Updated website with mission and vision
  • Privacy policy - integrated initial comments from attorney, got comments from Bridge committee, waiting for final comments from attorney
  • Communications/blog plan underway
  • Executive Director accepted to attend the YCombinator Startup school event for Data Carpentry
  • Planning an ‘announce’ list where we will distribute a monthly newsletter and significant events; list audience will be those interested in SWC/DC activities. Changes to policies that affect instructors will go out through AMY to instructors (no need for a new/separate list).

Discussion of approval of meeting reports
Need to update website with reports from Steering Committee meetings regularly. Next action: ED writes reports and creates issues for approval by SC members. SC members need to vote. Once approved, they’ll go on our web site.

Discussion of next steps on a policy for workshops for for-profit organizations
The survey of the instructor community was very useful and informative. There is general support for running workshops for for-profit organizations with some concerns about implementation. ED and AD have drafted potential policy points. Next action: ED will follow up with Karthik and Karen for feedback

Scheduling in person Steering Committee meeting
Proposed date range Jan 31 (Tues) - Feb 3 (Fri). Next action: Follow up with UC Berkeley about coordinating timing with work on Reproducible Research lessons.

Discussion of a plan for a release of ecology lessons for December, 2016
General agreement that a release is valuable for tagging and good precedent. Useful to have DOIs for reporting. The JOSS model would also be applicable for lesson release. For our current phase zenodo is appropriate.

Discussion of business development planning and activity based costing
It’s important for us to better understand our operations. It is there a good idea conceptually to move forward with something like activity based costs to evaluate our needs going forward. Next action: Will invite our pro-bono consultant to be on a future call to provide overview.

Meeting adjourned at 5pm Eastern
Next meeting: Oct 13, 4pm Eastern