Travel Awards
As an incentive to our valued instructors and to advance our goals of bringing the Carpentries’ teaching methods to instructors and to develop a research community dedicated to open and reproducible science, the Club provides financial support to teaching members in the form of travel awards.
Use of awards
Travel awards will be made for travel expenses related to the professional development of club members (regular awards) or for the advancement of club goals (special awards). Examples of professional development for regular awards include, but are not limited to: attending a conference, giving a talk, attending trainings and workshops, teaching at other institutions, or conducting field research.
The club can reimburse travel expenses for UF business travel under the following conditions:
- A Travel Authorization is filed either through the awardee’s home department or the UF Informatics Institute.
- All UF expense and travel rules apply.
- Typical allowed expenses include per-diem (excluding alcohol), airfare, car rental, hotel, and mileage.
- The awardee will receive a letter stating the allowed amount and appropriate information on which PeopleSoft chartfields to charge if their department is handling the Travel Authorization.
The board reserves the option to offer more or less than the amount requested by the applicant.
Regular awards
At least twice a year, normally during the Spring (for spring/summer travel) and Fall semesters (for fall/winter travel), the board will call for applications for travel awards. Everyone who has taught (as an instructor or a helper) at two or more club-organized events in the prior two years is eligible to apply for an award. (This includes any Software Carpentry or Data Carpentry workshop at UF that occurred prior to the organization of the UF Carpentries Club.) Applicants may request up to a $500 award depending on their needs.
Special awards
The board may vote to make special awards available for specific events the board considers important to the club goals outlined in the charter. Special awards require the approval of at least ⅔ of the board. The board will identify who among the members of the UF community are eligible to respond to special award calls. The award amount will be determined by the board and applications will be solicited and evaluated as per regular awards with the exception that a statement of the applicant’s ability to meet the board’s goals will be evaluated in place of the importance of the event to the applicant’s professional development (see below for more info on evaluation of applications).
Evaluation of applications
Before calling for applications, the board will select three members who will not be submitting applications to form an evaluation committee. Each application will first be anonymized by a board member not on the evaluation committee, and then evaluated independently by committee members using the following rubric to obtain a score out of ten points:
- Does the applicant meet the requirements for receiving travel funding? (1 point for “yes”)
- Has the applicant received travel funding from us in the past? (1 point for “no”)
- Has the applicant shown how this travel would benefit their professional development? (5 points)
- Does the proposed travel promote the goals, broadly defined, of the UF Carpentries Club? (3 points)
After each application has been individually scored, one of the committee members will collect these scores and calculate an average score for each application. Travel awards will be offered to the applicants with the highest average score. If the awardee is unable to undertake the proposed travel, the award will be offered to the next highest scoring applicant. Awardees must have the unanimous support of evaluation committee. If no application received unanimous support, no awards will be made in that application period.
Post-award report
Within one month of the funded travel, each awardee is expected to send their answers to the following questions to the UF Carpentry board:
- Where did you travel and what did you do there?
- How did this travel benefit your professional development?
- How did your experiences with the UF Carpentries Club benefit you during this travel?
These reports will be published to the UF Carpentries website and may be used to promote future awards.