In mid-2017, Data Carpentry piloted a Curriculum Advisory Committee (CAC) for the Genomics curriculum. The goals for this committee were to provide general oversight, vision, and leadership for the full Genomics lesson stack, to ensure that the lessons stay up-to-date with existing best practices in the field, and to continue to serve the needs of genomics practitioners attending our workshops. Genomics Curriculum Advisors met after the initial Genomics lesson publication in November to discuss proposed structural and major topical changes to the lessons and will be helping the Genomics Maintainer team to make decisions about these changes as we prepare for a second release this year.

Since first piloting the idea of a CAC, we’ve learned from our Maintainer community that this type of overall guidance is strongly desired by Maintainers for other lessons! Maintainers often face challenges trying to decide whether proposed large-scale changes are appropriate for their lessons. As Maintainers are usually not deeply familiar with other lessons in their curricular stack (and aren’t expected to be!), they often wonder how changes to their lesson will affect other lessons taught in the same workshop. Curriculum Advisors help to provide this higher-level oversight and take some of this burden away from the lesson Maintainers.

Due to overwhelming enthusiasm from the Maintainer community, we are now recruiting for Curriculum Advisors for the Data Carpentry Ecology lessons and the Software Carpentry full lesson stack. Applications are open to all Carpentry community members. We strongly encourage applications from community members with current classroom teaching experience, university or college faculty and staff, and Maintainers for these lessons.

Read more about the role of Curriculum Advisors.

Apply to join the Data Carpentry Ecology Curriculum Advisory Committee

Apply to join the Software Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee.

Applications will be open through March 16th, 2018. Please contact Erin Becker (ebecker@carpentries.org) with any questions.

The Carpentries are preparing to publish the Social Sciences and the Geospatial Data Carpentry curricula on Zenodo. The Social Science Lessons will be published in April, and the Geospatial Lessons in June. This will be the first publication for these lessons. We regularly publish our lessons (SWC, DC) to provide stable identifiers for polished versions of the lessons. This enables referenced discussions of the lesson materials and gives contributors a verifiable product to cite on their CVs or resumes.

This release will include the following lessons:

Geospatial Curriculum

• Introduction to Geospatial analysis
• Geospatial analysis in R

Social Science Curriculum

• Spreadsheet organization
• SQL
• Python
• OpenRefine
• R

Get involved!

If you’ve made a contribution to one of these lessons, you’re already an author. Help make sure the final product is polished and complete by getting involved in the lesson release.

We are organizing a Bug BBQ to prepare these lessons for release. The main goal for the Bug BBQ is to get the Geospatial and Social Science lessons ready for release. However, if you are a Maintainer for another lesson, and you are available and interested in getting some extra eyes on your lessons, let François know and we’ll include your repository on the Bug BBQ website.

Bug BBQ details

The Bug BBQ will start on April 12th, 2018 at 9am Eastern Time USA (1pm UTC) and end on April 13th, 2018 at 5pm Pacific Time USA (midnight on April 14th UTC). (Click on the links to see these times for your time zones)

Join with the community in a hacky-day to submit Issues and PRs to identify and fix problems and get us ready to publish.

We’ll provide communication channels for you to work with other community members and guidelines for how to get started.

Keep an eye open for more information about the Bug BBQ!

We’re excited to work with the community to release these lessons. Put these dates on your calendar, and we’ll send out reminders and updates too. These lessons belong to the community - help keep them great!

What’s a Bug BBQ?

During a Bug BBQ, the community gathers online to squash and grill as many bugs as possible to make our lessons polished and ready to be officially released.

This is a distributed event, so you don’t have to go anywhere. We’ll use GitHub, Slack, and a website to get organized. If you are part of a local Carpentries community with several people interested in taking part in the Bug BBQ, feel free to organize a real BBQ to feed the crowd. If you plan on getting together, let us know by opening an issue! We’ll add you to the website so other people can join you.

How long should I attend?

The Bug BBQ lasts almost 36 hours to accommodate working hours across the globe. We are a global community and we want everyone to have a chance to participate. Feel free to participate for as little or as long as you want. However, note that contributions made when sleep deprived are rarely the best ones.

If you are a Maintainer, please coordinate with the other Maintainers for your lesson to be ready to review, and provide feedback on the issues and pull requests that you will receive during the Bug BBQ.

Who is the Bug BBQ for?

Everyone is welcome to participate even if you are not familiar with the content of the lessons. We need your help to find typos, issues with formatting, help new contributors submit pull requests, answer general questions, review suggested changes, and more!

If you have questions, please contact François.

The Carpentries are dedicated to developing and empowering a diverse community of data enthusiasts. Whether you are an Instructor, learner, Maintainer, Mentor, Trainer, Executive Council member, Champion, or member of our Staff, you belong to this community. We are committed to creating avenues for you to contribute that are welcoming and inclusive, whether in-person or online.

Our Code of Conduct (CoC) serves a vital role in this commitment, as it outlines our commitment to provide a welcoming and supportive environment to all people regardless of who you are, or where you come from. Our CoC outlines very detailed reporting guidelines and an enforcement policy, so that, should violations occur, members of our community can rest assured that their concerns are being handled appropriately and in a timely manner.

The CoC was last updated in 2016. To read more about how these documents were developed, see this blog post. In a recent review however, we realized that we needed to increase the transparency of how the Code of Conduct Committee handles Code of Conduct incident reports, update wording that would discourage reporting incidents and update how we handle urgent situations. We’re consulting with Sage Sharp of Otter Tech Diversity and Inclusion Consulting to address these issues and make appropriate updates.

In revisiting the CoC, we now also have openings for the Code of Conduct Committee, and are looking for committee members who are passionate about equity and inclusion to serve on this committee. The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee manages all responses to reports of conduct violations, and advises the Executive Council on the need to alter any of the policies under its purview.

As this committee deals with complex issues including ethics, confidentiality, and conflict resolution, upon appointment, members of the committee will receive incident response training from Otter Tech.

Be a part of a committee that ensures that our community continues to thrive on diversity of thought and perspective. Complete this application to apply to serve. The deadline for applications is Monday, March 19 at 1100 UTC.

Should you have questions about the Code of Conduct, or want clarification on the roles and responsibilities of this committee, please contact the CoC committee.

In February, we held our mentoring groups virtual showcase, and community members engaged with mentors and mentees virtually to hear about the accomplishments they made over the course of their mentoring experience. Not only were mentees able to finish their instructor checkout tasks and contribute to the CarpentryCon taskforce, mentors started local communities and reconnected with community members globally.

You’ve expressed to us and each other the benefits these mentoring groups have had on your growth in and outside of the Carpentries. You are building powerful, and meaningful connections by developing peer communities. Because of that, we want to continue to support these groups, and give more community members the opportunity to join, either as a mentor, or a mentee.

The next round of mentoring groups will run from April 9th to August 13th. Get a head start on joining a mentoring group by attending one of two upcoming information sessions (to suit different time zones). Sessions will be held on March 15th at 11:30 UTC and 20:30 UTC. Sign up to attend either session on this etherpad.

Applications for both mentors and mentees are now open, and due by March 23rd. Mentor applications are open to instructors who have taught at least two workshops. Mentee applications are open to instructors who have taught less than two workshops. If you’d like to serve as a mentor, please complete the mentor application. If you’d like to be a mentee, please complete the mentee application.

Many mentor/mentee relationships extend well beyond the program time. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to connect, learn, and grow with community members. Join a mentoring group!

Tweet us your thoughts (@datacarpentry, @swcarpentry, @thecarpentries, @drkariljordan) using the hashtag #carpentriesmentoring.

We are excited to welcome seventeen newly badged Trainers to our community. The group recently finished their program with Karen Word and are now certified to teach new Carpentry Instructors.

Join us in welcoming Tania Allard, Anne C. Axel, Mik Black, Murray Cadzow, Mesfin Diro, Caroline Fadeke Ajilogba, Anne Fouilloux, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Claire Hardgrove, Toby Hodges, SherAaron Hurt, Senzo Mpungose, David Perez-Suarez, Juliane Schneider, Nicholas Tierney, Jessica Upani, Elizabeth Williams.

This was a very widely distributed group, so congratulations to the group and to Karen for making the training work across a challenging number of time zones.

Instructor training in New Zealand will get a boost with the addition of Mik and Murray. Adding Claire and Nicholas has doubled Trainer numbers in Australia. Expansion of Carpentries activity throughout Africa will accelerate with the addition of new Trainers Caroline, Senzo, Mesfin, and Jessica. Senzo and Caroline have already co-instructed with Erin Becker and Martin Dreyer at this workshop. The revival of the African Task Force should also spark an uptick in activity across the African continent. Alejandra, David, and Tania will also help build our Spanish language representation as we expand into Central and South America.

We look forward to many upcoming opportunities to teach with our new Trainer cohort!

On February 2, the Assessment Network held a well-attended webinar with Rochelle Tractenberg. Dr. Tractenberg holds two PhDs, one in Cognitive Sciences and the other in Statistics, and directs the Collaborative for Research on Outcomes and Metrics at Georgetown University, where she is a tenured professor in the Department of Neurology. It was a great privilege for our community to be able to engage in a conversation with her and to learn from her expertise.

Our starting point was the controversy about short-format training which arose last year, following the publication of a PNAS paper titled “Null effects of boot camps and short-format training for PhD students in life sciences.” The Carpentries design and deliver short-format training for working with software and data; trainees are researchers from various fields. The Carpentries’ initial response to that paper discussed many ways in which we have been successful with respect to our goals for Software and Data Carpentry workshops. However, given that short-format training is a known challenge for generating sustainable content learning, we hoped that Dr. Tractenberg’s expertise might shed some light on areas with room for improvement.

Dr. Tractenberg identified two of our strategies (i.e., “meet learners where they are” and “explicitly address motivation and self-efficacy”) as areas which could benefit from our leveraging of tools and concepts from educational psychology. So,Dr. Tractenberg introduced us to Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) and Messick’s criteria (1989). Bloom’s taxonomy comes with six levels of learning objectives, corresponding to increasing and accumulating complexity in thinking. These are:

• Remember/Reiterate
• Understand/Summarize
• Apply/Illustrate
• Analyze/Predict
• Create/Synthesize
• Evaluate/Compare/Judge

Messick’s criteria ask three questions to be used for instructional design and evaluation:

• What are the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) desired for learners?
• What actions/behaviors will reveal that those KSAs are present?
• What tasks will elicit those actions/behaviors?

To “meet learners where they are,” we could identify which Bloom’s level they are at and which higher Bloom’s level we are planning on taking them to. We would then use Messick’s KSAs to design, evaluate, and educate learners about where they are in the learning process.

For example, when teaching programming with Python, we may start from the understanding of a for loop (B2) and get to applying it to solve a specific problem (B3). However, if learners don’t know what a for loop is when they enter (B1), it might be better to constrain our short-term objectives to achieving understanding (B2). Setting our goals in terms of “growing a level” means our target outcomes might not match the level at which trainees need to operate once on their own. In their work, researchers typically operate at the highest levels of complexity, evaluating (B5) and creating (B6). The fact that researchers do habitually operate at these higher levels is helpful insofar as they know what it’s like to think in these ways. To help them be successful in meeting these post-workshop (real-world) goals, we should educate our learners about what they have achieved, but also about what the next steps of advancing in the Bloom’s hierarchy might look like. This not only gives them next steps to plan on, it also fosters metacognition – the process of thinking analytically about the process of learning, which is key to sustainability.

To “explicitly address motivation and self-efficacy,” metacognition is particularly key. Articulating expectations with regard to learning growth will also be helpful here, to help learners perceive their accomplishments within the workshop setting. However, to set the stage for sustainable learning, we should aim to educate learners about the road ahead of them and offer guidance about the kind of learning they should expect to be doing after they leave the workshop. Anticipating the steps that lie between them and the ability to actually apply their new skills to their research is key to both taking those steps and appropriately evaluating success as that learning continues.

While the Carpentries haven’t explicitly taught Messick, Bloom’s taxonomy has been present in the instructor curriculum up to its most recent iteration, and remains in spirit as we guide instructors through interpretation of our learning objectives. Its recent removal is owed to the fact that instructors are not typically the ones defining those learning objectives in the first place, so this is something we may wish to consider as we go about creating on-boarding procedures for curriculum designers and maintainers. While learning objectives are present throughout our curriculum and have been crafted with Bloom’s in mind, they are not necessarily specific in targeting a goal of “growing a level.” Furthermore, most of the education that we offer with regard to future learning occurs peripherally, e.g. as instructors model and describe their own learning process. There is clearly room for these ideas to grow within our community, and we will be keeping these suggestions firmly in mind as we move ahead.

We will also be keeping in touch with Dr. Tractenberg, as she will be joining us for our next meeting of the Virtual Assessment Network on March 23rd! Click here for your timezone. All are welcome to attend – please sign up via this Etherpad. Contact Kari Jordan (email) with questions or requests to join the Assessment Network list.

If you missed the webinar or want a refresher, check out the Etherpad, the annotated slides, the video recording, or the audio-only recording.

From January 24-25 (Thursday and Friday) we held a Data Carpentry Genomics workshop at UC Davis, led by Sue McClatchy. This was a “sold out” workshop, which filled up about a day after the registration went live. This indicates to us that we should host it again!

Overall, it was a great workshop. The learning workflow included:

Data organization and management -> Introduction to the shell -> Downloading sequencing data files -> QC (fastqc and trimming) -> Assembly -> Variant calling

Data Carpentry Genomics lessons are great

I’m a big fan of the DC genomics lessons. While I do enjoy the traditional (git, Python, bash) Software Carpentry lessons, my field is genomics. After spending some time working as a Bioinformatician for a core sequencing facility before returning to graduate school at UC Davis, I can’t emphasize enough how important it for the overall smoothness of the data sequencing project to spend time planning one’s data and sample sheets with the idea in mind that others (including computers) will be reading them.

While it may be sound boring and intuitive, the beginning sections on Project Organization and Data Management are particularly crucial to the people on the other end receiving data sheets from customers submitting samples for sequencing, then having to demultiplex Illumina data to deliver sequencing files based on those spreadsheets.

Bioinformatics as a discipline is on the rise, however not all researchers are going to go to work for Google or embark on a research program solely based on computational science or bioinformatics. Researchers generating the sequencing data are the ones who know the most about their data. So, putting skills in the hands of the researchers, rather than relying on external data analysis collaborators who might not be as invested in the data or qualified to interpret the analysis, is critical to making discoveries that are proportional to the amount of data being collected. Despite the large need, data science skills are still rarely taught as a routine part of undergraduate biology curriculum..

From Tracy Teal’s New Year message to the newly-united Carpentries:

“….it’s so crucial to democratize data skills, scaling who has access to training and creating a community of practice that values not just the tools, but the people who use them and teach them.”

There is a need for bioinformatics training. Data Carpentry can help!

Workshop participant stats:

• ~ 70% of participants are working in Bioinformatics/Genomics fields.
• ~ 50% from agriculture or environmental sciences
• ~ 60% graduate students, 15% post-doc, the remaining faculty, industry, research staff, management
• ~ 60% Mac / ~40% Windows
• >50% of learners reported using programming languages several times per year or less; 25% had never used a programming language
• >50% of users reported being “unsatisfied” or “very unsatisfied” with their pre-existing analysis workflow

After the survey, >70% of participants agreed or strongly agreed that they could now:

• Search for answers to technical questions online
• While working on a programming project, if I get stuck, I can find ways of overcoming the problem.

All survey respondents felt comfortable learning in this workshop environment.

Write-in positive responses included:

• immediate feedback (basics, questions, speed)
• instructors spend time to explain very basic things, so that beginners can follow.

Wishes included:

• The first half day was a little slow, but good to get people on the same page
• Wished that we could have covered basics of a programming language like R or Python

Here are a few of my pluses and wishes from the workshop.

Pluses:

• Great questions from participants, based on their experiences
• Full room! We had room for 25 and 30 people showed up. Plus one labradoodle. (We are in the School of Veterinary Medicine, after all.)

• Building community

Participants at this workshop subsequently have attended our weekly “Meet and Analyze Data” (MAD) sessions in the Center for Companion Animal Health, Bennet Conference Room on Thursdays, 3-5pm to work and ask questions. This was a great outcome.

• Nice data set for a quick workflow

The ‘Wrangling Genomics’ workflow, culminating in genome assembly and variant calling, used a Lenski data set (12 populations of E. coli propagated in the long-term evolution experiment (LTEE). Despite this being an old dataset with read lengths of 35 from the old Illumina GAIIx (Solexa) (no one will ever be getting new data with read lengths this short), the lesson still drives the point home that we can QC, assemble and call variants in a really short period of time during a workshop! Getting a workflow to work from beginning to end can be eye-opening for participants.

• A chance to interact with some nice Carpentry instructors on github!

During the workshop, we caught a few typos in the lessons, so submitted pull requests and contributed to issues (Issue #56, Pull request #115, Issue #111, Issue #112, Issue #113, Pull request #114, Pull request #134). Got some helpful feedback from friendly global DC genomics community. Nice to meet/interact with people on github!

• Taylor Reiter was a teaching ninja, troubleshooting on the fly when some of the steps were slightly out of order.
• Ryan Peek, Taylor Reiter, Jessica Mizzi, Jeff Miller, Daniel Standage, Shannon Joslin, Karen Word: co-instructors and helpers were amazing
• Didn’t get through everything in the lessons AND THAT WAS OKAY! Better not to subject participants to cognitive overload.

Wishes:

• Could use a better spreadsheet for this type of lesson, see Issue #56
• For Windows users, using puTTY to connect and transfer files to/from AWS cloud instances was a bit of a disaster, derailing several people during the lessons. Ryan Peek saved the day installing git bash for windows.
• Hidden directories were confusing, see Issue #112

Conclusion

• We should have this workshop again at UC Davis! UC Davis is probably not unique in this need.
• DC Genomics lessons are awesome, a few improvements could be made.
• Was nice to have a solid group of instructors and helpers who know each other from teaching previous workshops and could riff off each other.

Thanks!

Remind me…

When is the Bug BBQ?

It starts on April 12th, 9am Eastern (US) and ends on April 13th, 5pm Pacific (US) (click on the links to see these dates and times for your timezone).

What is the Bug BBQ? Why are we doing one?

You can read more about this in the announcement post.

What is the website with all the info?

https://carpentries.github.io/2018-04-bug-bbq/

I want to contribute to the lessons during the Bug BBQ!

We created a guide that outlines how to contribute to the Bug BBQ. There are many ways to get involved, the issues to address are as varied as the skills they require, and the time it takes to fix them.

As indicated in the guide, we strongly recommend that you leave a comment on the issue you are going to address before starting to work on it. This ensures that no work gets duplicated.

We will use Slack to communicate and coordinate. Feel free to ask questions in the #general channel or in the channel associated with the lesson you are working on. The Bug BBQ website lists all the Slack channels for the lessons involved in the Bug BBQ.

I’m a maintainer, what do I need to know before the Bug BBQ?

We suggest you coordinate with your co-maintainers to decide who will be online when. If at least one member of your lesson can check-in every few hours to review pull requests, provide feedback on the issues that are being opened, and monitor the Slack channels that would be great. If you can spread the load of this work among the maintainers that makes it easier. We prepared a spreadsheet for you to complete so that you can indicate your availability. This spreadsheet has tabs for Geospatial and Social Sciences (which are preparing for their first publication) and another tab for the other lessons that are part of the event.

We also suggest that you prepare your repository for the Bug BBQ. Close stale issues and pull requests, assign at least one of each “type” and “status” GitHub label to the relevant issues, open issues for things you know need to be addressed. Don’t forget to add the “good first issue” and “help wanted” labels to the relevant issues to make it easier for new contributors to identify things they can work on relatively easily.

Don’t hesitate to contact François or Erin, or leave a message on Slack if you have any questions. If there is anything we can do to make it easier for you to participate in the Bug BBQ, let us know.

I’m a maintainer, what do I need to do during the Bug BBQ?

During the Bug BBQ, as a Maintainer, you will provide feedback on the issues and pull requests that will come to your repository. You will assign GitHub labels to the issues that are being opened and update them as needed. You will answer questions contributors may have about the lesson.

This is a big job! Please coordinate with your co-Maintainers to decide who will do what, and don’t hesitate to contact us if we can help provide support for your team.

I’m a maintainer, and I want my lesson to be involved in the Bug BBQ. Is it too late?

No! Let François know and we’ll add your lesson to the Bug BBQ website.

I want to organize a local event, what do I need to do?

Local events are a great way to build and strengthen Carpentries communities. It is also a great opportunity to teach (and learn) how to use Git and GitHub for collaborative lesson development. You need a room with power outlets and an internet connection and a few hours of availability (BBQ optional).

If you want to organize a local event, fill out a GitHub issue.

The Carpentries lessons belong to the community. A Bug BBQ is an opportunity to work collectively on the lessons to make them better. We look forward to seeing all of your contributions!

Did you miss the deadline to join a mentoring group? Do not fear, there are still openings for mentees to join groups in the following timezones:

• UTC+2
• UTC+1
• UTC+8
• UTC+11

To join, fill out this application.

Mentoring groups are beneficial to participants because group members are able to focus on specific goals, including teaching their first workshop and developing new lesson contribution material. Being a part of a group that addresses something important to you is both powerful and enjoyable. You do not want to miss out on the Carpentries mentoring opportunities. Join a mentoring group today!

In November and December of 2017, we conducted a series of interviews with lesson Maintainers. You can read the summary and see a link to the full report on this blog post. A major theme that emerged from the interviews was that the Maintainers’ jobs were sometimes difficult because it was not always clear what was expected from them or how much authority they have on deciding what can be changed in the content of the lessons. To begin to address these issues, we developed an onboarding for new Maintainers to clarify the role and responsibilities of Maintainers. We also created Curriculum Advisory Committees for the different curricula, to offer high-level guidance on lesson structure and technology choices.

As our Maintainers have told us, being a Maintainer is a rewarding experience. Maintainers are often the first point of contact for new contributors with our community after going through instructor training. We encourage new Instructors to contribute to our lessons as part of the checkout process. We value the perspective that fresh eyes can bring to improve our lessons and value the opportunity for contributors to experience how powerful collaborative lesson development can be. Maintainers receive pull requests and issues that touch many aspects of our lessons. Some are small and easy to deal with (e.g., fixing a typo), others suggest significant changes to the structure of the lesson or the tools that are used, while others provide comments, suggestions, feedback or ideas for discussion.

The number and diversity of issues and pull requests that Maintainers receive can sometimes be overwhelming. Both Maintainers and contributors have said that better issue labeling would make it easier to maintain and contribute to lessons. Being able to categorize contributions would help Maintainers to think through the type of issues being reported, and allow them to identify suitable next steps to address them. Issue labels are also useful for facilitating communication among Maintainers.

Especially for new contributors, issue labels can make contribution easier by signaling what is available to work on, and the type of expertise needed.

The default set of labels provided by GitHub is not well-suited for our purpose, and Maintainers have expressed the need to have more options to describe the type of issues. For instance, the “bug” label is appropriate for a repository that only contains code, but our repositories contain both code and text and what qualifies as a bug is not always obvious. We also need to accommodate discussions that often take place as issues, and with other situations with which the standard set of GitHub label doesn’t deal well.

In the past, have modified the default set of labels to include the following:: “bug”, “discussion”, “enhancement”, “help-wanted”, “instructor-training”, “newcomer-friendly”, “question”, “template-and-tools”, “work-in-progress”. However, while these labels are better suited to our lessons than the default set of labels provided by GitHub, use of these labels has not been standard across all lesson repos, with many repos introducing new labels. This indicates a need for a more robust set of labels to cover different scenarios faced in our lessons.

Beyond the type of issues, we also want to signal the progress status to both contributors and Maintainers. Contributors should be able to tell from the list of issues the ones that are available to be worked on, and Maintainers should be able to identify issues that are being worked on by contributors. For this reason, we worked with the Maintainer community to propose a new set of issue labels, including two main categories: the type labels, and the status labels. We include these words as prefixes so Maintainers can easily filter on them when assigning them to issues.

Maintainers have also provided feedback that it is complicated to assess prioritization and difficulty of issues. We proposed a single label for each category: one to signal issues that need to fix as soon as possible (“high priority”), and one to signal that a first-time contributor can address it (we’ll use “help wanted”).

With the Maintainers groupBased on the initial feedback from Maintainers, looking at how other organizations that deal with many contributions are using GitHub labels, we developed a set of issue labels to test, along with definitions for each label. We wrote a proposal, and requested feedback from the community on this document as well as during our monthly Maintainers call. Maintainers from five lesson repositories volunteered to test these labels:

• Data Carpentry R Ecology
• SWC Python Novice Gapminder
• SWC R Novice Gapminder
• SWC Git
• Instructor Training

The feedback from Maintainers of these pilot repositories was positive, and the broader Maintainer community commented extensively on the proposal. Comments revolved around the following issues:

• Too many labels, especially in the “type” category, leading to too many colors;
• GitHub started to highlight on their website issues that have the “help wanted” and “good first issue”, not using these labels would mean we would not take advantage of these features;
• We included a “status:completed” label that was viewed as redundant with simply closing the issue;
• The distinction between “needs contributor” and “help wanted” was not clear;
• The definition of some labels needed to be clarified.

We’re very grateful to the Maintainer community for their thoughtful feedback on this proposal. . With the comments that we received, and the testing that was done by Maintainers for the five pilot repositories, we gained valuable information about the usefulness of these issue labels. We are now ready to move into a beta-test. We will test these labels for at least one month, and will solicit feedback from Maintainers and survey how they are being used across our repositories during this time. This information will be used to guide any modifications to the issue labels and ensure that they are maximally useful to our Maintainer and contributor communities.

For more detailed information about the labels and their definitions in available in The Carpentries handbook.

The goal for these new issue labels is to provide tools and options to make the Maintainer role easier and help new contributors know where they can be more useful. With these issue tags, when a contributor opens the issue list for a lesson, they’ll know which issues can be addressed or are already being worked on. To this end, we recommend that each issue be labeled with both a “type” and a “status” issue, and that they are updated as work on the issue progresses.

Thank you to all the Maintainers who have tested, reviewed, and modified the initial proposed set of labels. We hope they will make lesson maintenance and contributions easier, and ultimately improve the quality of our teaching materials. As with everything in The Carpentries, the process of deciding how to label our issues is iterative and open to changes based on feedback from community members. Let us know how they work for you! If you have comments or suggestions about issue labeling for our lessons, please add your thoughts to this issue.

As The Carpentries, we’re excited to announce that we have consolidated and updated many materials and resources to more easily share them online and be a community resource.

Today we are launching an all-new The Carpentries Handbook. We will also be tweeting regularly through a new Carpentries Twitter account.

The Carpentries Handbook

We are excited to release our new Carpentries Handbook! Historically, information and resources have been spread across various websites, Google docs, GitHub repos, and more. We now have a one-stop shop that consolidates all these resources. In one place, you can now find information on how to run a workshop, how to develop and maintain lessons, and how to participate in an instructor training event. You’ll also learn about getting the word out about Carpentries activities through our communication channels, and how to get involved in our global community. Many, many thanks to all the community members who helped develop this site.

We welcome everyone’s feedback on this Handbook. Feel free to submit issues or pull requests on this GitHub repo.

The Carpentries Twitter

We also will be regularly tweeting from our new The CarpentriesTwitter account from now on. Data and Software Carpentry-specific messages will still be tweeted from the individual Twitter accounts, and people will most likely tweet the handles of the individual Carpentries when teaching workshops. People are welcome to use the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and The Carpentries Twitter handles in whatever combination that suits them.

Please take a look at all our new material and let us know what you think. You can comment via Twitter, Slack, or Facebook, but since issues are less ephemeral than a Tweet, raising an issue or submitting a pull request to the Handbook repo may work best so we can have a public discussion about what still needs doing.

We are excited to announce that Chris Erdmann has been hired as the Library Carpentry Community and Development Director starting May 4, 2018.

Chris has worked in libraries for more than 21 years to integrate data management and workflows in database and library systems. Through training, consulting and tool development to build programs, he has tried to empower people in research and library communities to work effectively with data. Chris received his MLIS at the University of Washington iSchool while working at the University’s Technology Transfer Office, where he helped automate workflows and develop the unit’s web presence and analytics. He spent roughly ten years working alongside astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to advance library data-mining and linking services, e.g. ESO Telescope Bibliography. Also during this time, he led an experimental training series called Data Scientist Training for Librarians (DST4L) geared towards teaching librarians data-savvy skills to help transform their library services to meet the needs of their research communities. He recently joined the Library Carpentry governance group.

He is a co-author with Matt Burton, Liz Lyon, and Bonnie Tijerina on the recent report Shifting to Data Savvy: The Future of Data Science In Libraries, where Library Carpentry and The Carpentries are highlighted as a necessary next step for libraries to advance their research services.

Chris will be working with the Library Carpentry community and The Carpentries to start mapping out the infrastructure for growing the community, formalizing lesson development processes, expanding its pool of instructors, and inspiring more instructor trainers to meet the demand for Library Carpentry workshops around the globe and thus reach new regions and communities.

This new position is funded by IMLS and hosted by the University of California Curation Center (UC3), the digital curation program of the California Digital Library (CDL). It is intended to support the work of the Library Carpentry governance committee on streamlining operations with The Carpentries, determining standard curriculum, growing instructor training for librarians and planning for community events like the upcoming Mozilla Sprint to update Library Carpentry materials. Chris will be helping to manage the sprint work in the northern hemisphere.

Chris is excited about advancing the profession and sees the Library Carpentry and The Carpentries communities as the perfect catalyst to do that. He is on Twitter as @libcce, on GitHub and on LinkedIn, and we’re very excited to welcome Chris to this role!

For more information on Library Carpentry:https://librarycarpentry.github.io Follow @libcarpentry on Twitter. For more information on UC3 and California Digital Library: http://uc3.cdlib.org Follow @caldiglib and @UC3CDL on Twitter.

The first inaugural CarpentryCon is less than 50 days away! The taskforce is diligently working to make sure all t’s are crossed and I’s are dotted to ensure that the Community enjoys a wonderful un-conference. While doing so, we have realized that we need one more thing…YOU!!!

Have you had a desire to get involved with the planning of CarpentryCon and did not have the time? Or maybe, you felt as though you did not know where you could be most valued? Or maybe, you thought the taskforce had everything under control and did not need your help?

If you had any of those thoughts, I’m happy to tell you those are all misconceptions. While the planning is well underway, there are areas that can use a few additional hands. And we would LOVE for you to get involved! You may only be able to assist for an hour, a day or possibly the entire conference. It does not matter the amount of time, if you want to help, there will be something that could use your assistance!

Here are areas that could use YOU!

• Pre-Conference Setup
• Registration
• Speakers and Workshops
• Social Media
• AV
• Entertainment

There are awesome benefits to becoming a volunteer. Here are just a few:

• Making an impact on The Carpentries community
• Network with The Carpentries community
• Discounted items
• Free items

CarpentryCon will be a history making event for The Carpentries. We would like for as many of our community members to be a part of this great event. If you would like to get involved, please send an email carpentrycon@carpentries.org to receive more information.

We look forward to seeing you in Dublin, Ireland!

In December 2017, we made a call for community members to contribute to two new sets of Data Carpentry lessons, targeted towards researchers working with geospatial data or survey data for the social sciences.

There was overwhelming interest from the community in working to develop and publish these two curricula. In the past few months, six new Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons, and five new Maintainers for the Social Sciences lessons have gone through Maintainer onboarding and begun to work with their lessons. Please join our community in welcoming Chris Prener, Geoff LaFlair, Peter Smyth, Juan Fung, Stephen Childs, Tyson Swetnam, Lauren O’Brien, Janani Selvaraj, and Lachlan Deer as new Maintainers on these lessons (Chris Prener and Juan Fung will serve as Maintainers for both the Geospatial and the Social Sciences lessons), as well as Leah Wasser and Joseph Stachelek, who will be continuing on as Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons.

In addition to new Maintainers, a set of Curriculum Advisors has also been assembled for each of these new curricula. Curriculum Advisors help to provide strategic oversight, vision, and leadership for a particular set of lessons to guide the overall development of the lessons. Please join us in welcoming Arindam Basu, Chris Prener, Geoff LaFlair, Katie Metzler, Rachel Gibson, Reka Solymosi, Peter Smyth, Scott Peterson, and Stephen Childs as the Curriculum Advisory Committee for the Social Sciences lessons and Anne Fouilloux, Arthur Endsley, Chris Prener, Jeff Hollister, Joseph Stachelek, Leah Wasser, Michael Sumner, Michele Tobias, and Stace Maples as the Curriculum Advisory Committee for the Geospatial lessons. Curriculum Advisors meet twice yearly and advise the curriculum’s Maintainers in overall strategy for the lessons. Meeting minutes for Curriculum Advisory meetings are available in the group’s GitHub repo.

Thanks to the phenomenal support from the Maintainers and Curriculum Advisors for these lessons, as well as the support of the Carpentry community during the recent Bug BBQ, these lessons are on track for publication. The Social Sciences lessons are scheduled for release at the end of April and the Geospatial lessons will be complete in June.

We still have work to do before publication! Everyone is invited to help as we enter the final stretch for preparing these lessons for their first official release. If you have a few minutes to spare, head on over to one of the lesson repositories and check out the open issues or review an existing pull request. You can also contact the lesson Maintainers on the SWC Slack channel with specific questions.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in building these lessons up to this point. It has been a fantastic community effort. We’re excited to be releasing these lessons soon so that they can benefit researchers in the social sciences and geospatial communities.

Website Launch

We are excited to announce that The Carpentries website is now live!

The new website celebrates our merged identity as The Carpentries.

The new website will give you access to all things ‘Carpentries’, in other words, it will give you easy access to what is common information across the merged organization. The sorts of things you will find there include our Code of Conduct, information about instructor training and assessment, a range of shared policies, including our privacy policy, details of staffing and project governance, and a whole lot more.

The existing Data and Software Carpentry sites will remain in place alongside the new site. Since Data and Software Carpentry are ongoing lesson organizations, information related to lessons belongs on those individual sites. We will gradually take down material that is now more logically based on The Carpentries website.

You may notice that a lot of the links on The Carpentries transfer you directly to The Carpentries Handbook that we launched last week.

The Handbook has been enthusiastically received by our community. For those who haven’t seen it yet, find it here. The aim of the Handbook is to provide a one-stop shop for people wanting all kinds of Carpentries-related information. Information is being added and updated all the time so please let us know if there is something missing. The Handbook and the website will complement each other to cover all things Carpentries.

Please let us know if there are errors or omissions on our new website. You can raise an issue about the website at this link, or about the Handbook at this link.

The launch of the new website completes our transition to a new, merged, online identity as The Carpentries. Increasingly we will blog as The Carpentries, rather than as Software or Data Carpentry, so be sure to check out our new blog.

We also have our new merged Twitter feed. Follow The Carpentries on Twitter.

Background

The UF R Users Group was formed in January 2017, and since then we’ve been running a weekly “UF R Meetup”: A two-hour session consists of a 30 to 60 minute presentation/tutorials followed by an “open lab” session. The meetup is meant to be a casual, informal opportunity to learn as a community, and seek face-to-face advice.

By the end of the second semester of running the meetup, we had identified a couple of issues:

• The majority of the participants were either beginners or completely new to R (and programming in general).
• As our presentations shifted to cater to new users, it became difficult to engage and entice more advanced programmers.

In addition, our presentations on the basics of R were unstructured and constructed on-the-fly – not the best way to teach and learn R. We felt that these disconnects were making it difficult to establish a sustainable learning community.

In January 2018, we decided to run an introductory workshop series separate from the meetup. The workshop would provide structured lessons on the basics of R and allow the meetup to cover more advanced topics. Luckily for us, The Carpentries already have well-structured lessons for these materials, and we could rely on the strong pool of Carpentry instructors at the University of Florida.

The question then became: “Do we want to run a traditional two-day Carpentry workshop, or try something different?”. We already knew that there was interest in regular weekly meetings, and saw potential in giving access to people who could not commit to a full two-day Carpentries workshop, or people who might need a refresher even though they’ve taken the two-day workshop. So we decided to run our workshop a bit differently than normal.

Implementation

We used the Data Carpentry in Ecology curriculum as a starting point. This included Data Analysis and Visualization in R, Data Organization in Spreadsheets, and Data Cleaning with OpenRefine. The two-day workshops usually include the Data Management in SQL lesson as well, but we felt it may have been to much for learners to learn all the SQL concepts in a two-hour session. Instead we opted to create some new material centered on the join features in dplyr, which has very similar concepts. This extended naturally from the dplyr lesson, and we even titled it “Advanced Dataframe Manipulation” to reflect that.

Besides that it was run exactly like any other Carpentry workshop. We had different instructors for each lesson, there were helpers available, we created an Etherpad for collaborative note-taking, and used red and green sticky notes for real time feedback. You can view the workshop homepage.

How it went

We’ve been a part of many Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry workshops here at the University of Florida, and this one went as well as any of them. Anonymous feedback at the end of each lesson was universally positive, and several participants told us in person how much they enjoyed it.

We capped the elongated workshop at 40 participants and it filled fairly quickly. However, at most only 18 came to a particular session and attendance dropped over the 7 weeks.

Several factors likely contributed to this attendance pattern. Attendance is also often low the first time a new training opportunity is offered. We also chose not to collect a registration fee, because our group is designed to be an informal alternative to other resources on our campus, including formal courses and traditional Carpentry workshops (on average there are about three Carpentry workshops each semester at UF). The lack of a financial commitment from students may have been part of the the depressed attendance. We also found that there was less interest and reduced attendance in the non-R focused lessons, as well as more interest in the tidyverse-based lessons compared to base R lessons. Scheduling conflicts also arose over the course of the series, and once someone had to miss a lesson there appeared to be a lack of motivation to continue.

Lastly, we were very interested in how this schedule format improved access. Anecdotally several participants told us how they preferred a two-hour-a-week workshop over a full two days. In a post-workshop survey, two of the three respondents said they preferred this schedule over a two-day workshop.

Scheduling-wise, the majority of material fit into the two-hour time slots. The exception was the “Manipulating Dataframes” lesson where we did not have time for the very last section. Luckily this fit in nicely with the “Advanced Dataframe Manipulation” lesson to fill the full two hours in week 6.

Lessons Learned

Overall, we feel this elongated workshop was a success and we hope to run similar ones in the future. We are encouraged by the post-survey responses, as well as the anecdotal comments from the attendees. The workshop series also provided a less time- and material-intensive opportunity for newly trained instructors to gain some teaching experience.

There a few things we may change:

• There were participants who felt confident not attending the first few sessions and only attended specific ones such as Data Manipulation or Visualization. This likely contributed to, at most, 18 of the 40 sign ups attending. In the beginning we encouraged people to attend every lesson but did not enforce this. In the future, we would consider session-specific sign-ups where participants can express interest in any or all of the sessions based on their needs.

• We found it helpful to do a short recap at the beginning of each session to quickly summarize the primary lessons from the prior week.

• We collected and re-distributed the post-it notes every week so as not to waste them, though some eventually lost their stickiness. In the end we used up roughly three-quarters of a single stack for each color.

We are excited to announce the initial release of a Data Carpentry Social Sciences Curriculum. This is the first Data Carpentry Curriculum to be released targeted towards researchers outside of the life sciences and provides an opportunity to reach out to new communities.

Peter Smyth has assembled the initial content for these lessons with the guidance of Rachel Gibson, Professor of Political Science at the Cathie Marsh Institute of Social Research, University of Manchester, UK. It was polished during the April 2018 Bug BBQ, and the finishing was done by the lesson Maintainers in coordination with Carpentries staff.

This curriculum aims at teaching similar skills like the ones covered in the Ecology curriculum. It is focused on best practices for working with rectangular and tidy data. The curriculum covers data organization in spreadsheets, data cleaning with OpenRefine, as well as data manipulation and visualization with R. There are also lessons on SQL and Python that are available but are not part of this initial release.

As with other materials for Data Carpentry, the same dataset is used across all the lessons. Here, we use a simplified version of a research datasets generated by the SAFI (Studying African Farmer-led Irrigation) research project. This dataset is available on Figshare and is survey data relating to households and agriculture in Tanzania and Mozambique. The survey data was collected through interviews conducted between November 2016 and June 2017 and covered such things as household features (e.g., construction materials used, number of household members), agricultural practices (e.g., water usage), assets (e.g., number and types of livestock) and details about the household members.

If this curriculum were a piece of software, we would say it is in “beta”. The authors of this curriculum have taught it, and it is now ready to be taught by other members of The Carpentries community. We are interested in your feedback to improve it. We want to ensure it meets the needs and matches the skills that Social Scientists want to acquire when working with data. If you are a social scientist (or studying to become one), please review the lessons and provide us with your feedback. If you are interested in teaching one of the first Social Sciences Data Carpentry workshops, let us know by filling this form.

Remind me…

When is the Bug BBQ?

It starts on April 12th, 9am Eastern (US) and ends on April 13th, 5pm Pacific (US) (click on the links to see these dates and times for your timezone).

What is the Bug BBQ? Why are we doing one?

You can read more about this in the announcement post.

What is the website with all the info?

https://carpentries.github.io/2018-04-bug-bbq/

I want to contribute to the lessons during the Bug BBQ!

We created a guide that outlines how to contribute to the Bug BBQ. There are many ways to get involved, the issues to address are as varied as the skills they require, and the time it takes to fix them.

As indicated in the guide, we strongly recommend that you leave a comment on the issue you are going to address before starting to work on it. This ensures that no work gets duplicated.

We will use Slack to communicate and coordinate. Feel free to ask questions in the #general channel or in the channel associated with the lesson you are working on. The Bug BBQ website lists all the Slack channels for the lessons involved in the Bug BBQ.

I’m a maintainer, what do I need to know before the Bug BBQ?

We suggest you coordinate with your co-maintainers to decide who will be online when. If at least one member of your lesson can check-in every few hours to review pull requests, provide feedback on the issues that are being opened, and monitor the Slack channels that would be great. If you can spread the load of this work among the maintainers that makes it easier. We prepared a spreadsheet for you to complete so that you can indicate your availability. This spreadsheet has tabs for Geospatial and Social Sciences (which are preparing for their first publication) and another tab for the other lessons that are part of the event.

We also suggest that you prepare your repository for the Bug BBQ. Close stale issues and pull requests, assign at least one of each “type” and “status” GitHub label to the relevant issues, open issues for things you know need to be addressed. Don’t forget to add the “good first issue” and “help wanted” labels to the relevant issues to make it easier for new contributors to identify things they can work on relatively easily.

Don’t hesitate to contact François or Erin, or leave a message on Slack if you have any questions. If there is anything we can do to make it easier for you to participate in the Bug BBQ, let us know.

I’m a maintainer, what do I need to do during the Bug BBQ?

During the Bug BBQ, as a Maintainer, you will provide feedback on the issues and pull requests that will come to your repository. You will assign GitHub labels to the issues that are being opened and update them as needed. You will answer questions contributors may have about the lesson.

This is a big job! Please coordinate with your co-Maintainers to decide who will do what, and don’t hesitate to contact us if we can help provide support for your team.

I’m a maintainer, and I want my lesson to be involved in the Bug BBQ. Is it too late?

No! Let François know and we’ll add your lesson to the Bug BBQ website.

I want to organize a local event, what do I need to do?

Local events are a great way to build and strengthen Carpentries communities. It is also a great opportunity to teach (and learn) how to use Git and GitHub for collaborative lesson development. You need a room with power outlets and an internet connection and a few hours of availability (BBQ optional).

If you want to organize a local event, fill out a GitHub issue.

redirect_from: /blog/bug-bbq-how-to-be-involved/

The Carpentries lessons belong to the community. A Bug BBQ is an opportunity to work collectively on the lessons to make them better. We look forward to seeing all of your contributions!

Did you miss the deadline to join a mentoring group? Do not fear, there are still openings for mentees to join groups in the following timezones:

• UTC+2
• UTC+1
• UTC+8
• UTC+11

To join, fill out this application.

Mentoring groups are beneficial to participants because group members are able to focus on specific goals, including teaching their first workshop and developing new lesson contribution material. Being a part of a group that addresses something important to you is both powerful and enjoyable. You do not want to miss out on the Carpentries mentoring opportunities. Join a mentoring group today!

In November and December of 2017, we conducted a series of interviews with lesson Maintainers. You can read the summary and see a link to the full report on this blog post. A major theme that emerged from the interviews was that the Maintainers’ jobs were sometimes difficult because it was not always clear what was expected from them or how much authority they have on deciding what can be changed in the content of the lessons. To begin to address these issues, we developed an onboarding for new Maintainers to clarify the role and responsibilities of Maintainers. We also created Curriculum Advisory Committees for the different curricula, to offer high-level guidance on lesson structure and technology choices.

As our Maintainers have told us, being a Maintainer is a rewarding experience. Maintainers are often the first point of contact for new contributors with our community after going through instructor training. We encourage new Instructors to contribute to our lessons as part of the checkout process. We value the perspective that fresh eyes can bring to improve our lessons and value the opportunity for contributors to experience how powerful collaborative lesson development can be. Maintainers receive pull requests and issues that touch many aspects of our lessons. Some are small and easy to deal with (e.g., fixing a typo), others suggest significant changes to the structure of the lesson or the tools that are used, while others provide comments, suggestions, feedback or ideas for discussion.

The number and diversity of issues and pull requests that Maintainers receive can sometimes be overwhelming. Both Maintainers and contributors have said that better issue labeling would make it easier to maintain and contribute to lessons. Being able to categorize contributions would help Maintainers to think through the type of issues being reported, and allow them to identify suitable next steps to address them. Issue labels are also useful for facilitating communication among Maintainers.

Especially for new contributors, issue labels can make contribution easier by signaling what is available to work on, and the type of expertise needed.

The default set of labels provided by GitHub is not well-suited for our purpose, and Maintainers have expressed the need to have more options to describe the type of issues. For instance, the “bug” label is appropriate for a repository that only contains code, but our repositories contain both code and text and what qualifies as a bug is not always obvious. We also need to accommodate discussions that often take place as issues, and with other situations with which the standard set of GitHub label doesn’t deal well.

In the past, have modified the default set of labels to include the following:: “bug”, “discussion”, “enhancement”, “help-wanted”, “instructor-training”, “newcomer-friendly”, “question”, “template-and-tools”, “work-in-progress”. However, while these labels are better suited to our lessons than the default set of labels provided by GitHub, use of these labels has not been standard across all lesson repos, with many repos introducing new labels. This indicates a need for a more robust set of labels to cover different scenarios faced in our lessons.

Beyond the type of issues, we also want to signal the progress status to both contributors and Maintainers. Contributors should be able to tell from the list of issues the ones that are available to be worked on, and Maintainers should be able to identify issues that are being worked on by contributors. For this reason, we worked with the Maintainer community to propose a new set of issue labels, including two main categories: the type labels, and the status labels. We include these words as prefixes so Maintainers can easily filter on them when assigning them to issues.

Maintainers have also provided feedback that it is complicated to assess prioritization and difficulty of issues. We proposed a single label for each category: one to signal issues that need to fix as soon as possible (“high priority”), and one to signal that a first-time contributor can address it (we’ll use “help wanted”).

With the Maintainers groupBased on the initial feedback from Maintainers, looking at how other organizations that deal with many contributions are using GitHub labels, we developed a set of issue labels to test, along with definitions for each label. We wrote a proposal, and requested feedback from the community on this document as well as during our monthly Maintainers call. Maintainers from five lesson repositories volunteered to test these labels:

• Data Carpentry R Ecology
• SWC Python Novice Gapminder
• SWC R Novice Gapminder
• SWC Git
• Instructor Training

The feedback from Maintainers of these pilot repositories was positive, and the broader Maintainer community commented extensively on the proposal. Comments revolved around the following issues:

• Too many labels, especially in the “type” category, leading to too many colors;
• GitHub started to highlight on their website issues that have the “help wanted” and “good first issue”, not using these labels would mean we would not take advantage of these features;
• We included a “status:completed” label that was viewed as redundant with simply closing the issue;
• The distinction between “needs contributor” and “help wanted” was not clear;
• The definition of some labels needed to be clarified.

We’re very grateful to the Maintainer community for their thoughtful feedback on this proposal. . With the comments that we received, and the testing that was done by Maintainers for the five pilot repositories, we gained valuable information about the usefulness of these issue labels. We are now ready to move into a beta-test. We will test these labels for at least one month, and will solicit feedback from Maintainers and survey how they are being used across our repositories during this time. This information will be used to guide any modifications to the issue labels and ensure that they are maximally useful to our Maintainer and contributor communities.

For more detailed information about the labels and their definitions in available in The Carpentries handbook.

The goal for these new issue labels is to provide tools and options to make the Maintainer role easier and help new contributors know where they can be more useful. With these issue tags, when a contributor opens the issue list for a lesson, they’ll know which issues can be addressed or are already being worked on. To this end, we recommend that each issue be labeled with both a “type” and a “status” issue, and that they are updated as work on the issue progresses.

Thank you to all the Maintainers who have tested, reviewed, and modified the initial proposed set of labels. We hope they will make lesson maintenance and contributions easier, and ultimately improve the quality of our teaching materials. As with everything in The Carpentries, the process of deciding how to label our issues is iterative and open to changes based on feedback from community members. Let us know how they work for you! If you have comments or suggestions about issue labeling for our lessons, please add your thoughts to this issue.