2018-11-13 Board Meeting

Action Items

• Justin: send email to get the official survey from the Geospatial workshop
• Justin: add survey information to the Geospatial workshop repository
• By next Weds. get Geospatial workshop materials reviewed and blog post up (Justin, Geraldine, Sergio, Joe, Kristina, Simona)
• Gauruv: edit the travel award rubric to include details about a post-travel award blog post
• Geraldine and Justin: follow up with Taylor regarding the potential EPI workshop
• Joe will follow up with travel grant awardees to get information for a blog post
• Geraldine will send out a poll with different options for how to deal with election ties
• Everyone on the board: think about if you’d like to volunteer for the Treasurer or Communications position
• Items to discuss next meeting: Slack, DSI, assign Treasurer and Communications positions

Attendees

Board members: Joe, Gauruv, Geraldine, Elise, Simona (remote), Kristina (remote) Non-board members: Justin, Stephen Longmire, Matt (remote)

Agenda

• Introductions
• Approve last week’s minutes
• Report/discussion on Geospatial workshop (or ensure we set up a debriefing session)
• Travel awards update
• FIU workshop?
• Next semester workshops
• Elections: how to deal with ties
• Miscellaneous
• Next meeting

Approve last week’s minutes

• Add the action items to the top of the minutes
• Also be sure to include who is responsible for each action item
• Last week’s minutes were approved

Geospatial workshop report/discussion

• Most common critique was too much time spent on intro. to R
• In future workshops, try to scale down to just dplyr, ggplot
• Ran out of time, cutting basic R & minimize repetition would help save time
• Just need to be careful to keep it inclusive for people who don’t know R
• With intro, discuss R Project and data types, but then skip rest of intro, stick to dplyr, ggplot
• Rasters too large, difficult to load, hard to test/improvise because plotting was slow
• Recommend modifying rasters
• Could ask people to go over the intro to R before they come to the class
• Justin will email to get the official survey from the Geospatial workshop
• Got 6 responses from Justin’s survey, will add them to the repository
• More people had already had R experience when coming to the class
• 66% said that they didn’t need to include the intro to R section
• Mixed pre-workshop experience with geospatial data
• Other topics of interest for workshops: “literally everything ever”, machine learning and R, python, descriptive stats with vegan, in-depth ggplot
• Justin will add survey information to the repository
• Set date to get official feedback from Geospatial workshop, try for pre-Thanksgiving
• By next Weds. get materials reviewed and blog post up (Justin, Geraldine, Sergio, Joe, Kristina, Simona)

FIU Workshop

• March or April for the Homestead workshop
• Simona followed up with person at FIU, but hasn’t heard back

Future Workshops

• Geraldine and Justin: follow up with Taylor at EPI
• Social sciences lesson: Rafaelle Vaca (Sociology), runs an 8-week series, Could check with Sasha (Linguistics) to see if there’s interest for Social Sciences
• Basic workshop: Matt suggested doing it a few weeks after (to give new instructors a chance to teach) Could get many instructors to split up larger lessons
• Last year, goal was 3 a semester
• Instructor training (Last year: March 5/6, 2018)
• Goal to get EPI or basic workshop before the instructor training, then the other one after the instructor training
• Semester-long instructor training was just too long, hard to keep people involved Had broken it into 2-hour blocks over 7 weeks, instead just do the R lessons, not open refine, spreadsheets, Make it into 4 2-hour sessions
• For Software Carpentry: could break it up, it may turn it into an unofficial Software Carpentry workshop This structure would be similar to DSI’s workshops, make sure that lessons don’t overlap too much, check with DSI to see what their teaching strategy is
• No decisions made yet, will continue discussing

Travel Award Update

• Awarded to the next person, both attended workshops recently
• Gauruv has updated the rubric
• Gauruv will open an issue to include following up with a travel award blog post
• Set up blog post with how the travel awards were used (something short)
• Joe will follow up with awardees to get the blog post

## Miscellaneous: Treasurer and Communications position

• Agreed to keep it a longer term position
• Matt is fine with being half-treasurer to help out the new treasurer
• Action item: everyone on the board, think about what position you’d like to volunteer for
• Next meeting: assign Treasurer and Communications positions

## Elections: How to deal with ties

• Previously had decided to keep both members on the board
• Make sure that the rules are upfront
• Options are: Ranked choice voting, Random chance for those that tie, or Let everyone who ties on the board
• Have the two people who tie run against each other (Decided against this, because we’d have to send it to the full list a second time)
• Geraldine will send out a poll with different options

## Other items: Slack

• Needs to be organized in order for it to work
• Would need to get everyone using it
• Carpentries’ mailing list (Topic Box) could have options as well
• Tabled until the next meeting so we can have all board members decide

## Working with DSI

• Joe went to DSI meeting, current president will be graduating
• Over their 3 years, had issues with retention
• Of DSI participants, 40% are grad students
• Try to interact with DSI more
• Continue discussion at next meeting

## Next Meeting

• Tuesday, Nov. 27th at 3:45pm
• Geraldine will be chair for the next meeting
• Switched Secretary roles: Kristina will be secretary for the next two meetings
• Instructions for taking minutes: https://github.com/UF-Carpentry/Coordination/wiki/Taking-Board-Meeting-Minutes