Hao would also like to organize more social events around computing
Melissa Rethlefsen (ml.rethlefsen@ufl.edu) at the UF Health Sciences Library is organizing a conference in March 2020 and is looking for people to get in touch with to discuss (including specifically UF Carpentries), and Daniel Maxwell (danielmaxwell@ufl.edu) is happy to make this connection.
Long-term community building strategy
Long-term workshop schedule (Adam Rivers)
USDA got funding to do a workshop on Machine Learning
Funds to bring in around 30 people, have people around the US who can
Using the Google TensorFlow two-day crash course as a template
Don’t really have a great space to do this workshop in their facility
Workshop materials are not yet set, and Google’s materials might focus on non-scientific problems (e.g. clicks), so they might adapt the material to scientific problems.
Lots of short video lectures, but Adam would prefer people covering that material in person
Needs to happen before the fiscal year end in Sep 30, so they’re aiming for August, but as late as maybe Sep 10
Might want to coordinate with NSF Center for Big Learning; they might have students interested in very qualified.
Might be structured similarly to a previous workshop they ran on metagenomics
TensorFlow has short lessons (three minutes talking, three minutes doing), so it might be adapted to Carpentries somewhat earlier.
Using a easier frontend like Keras
Adam to create an issue on our wiki and we’ll follow up on that
UF/USDA workshop (August?)
Funding for Carpentries membership renewal (Geraldine)
Usually it’s 15K for gold membership
IFAS seems very keen to spend their money before the end of the financial year, but they’re discussing this internally at the moment
How do we do priority registration with IFAS, given the huge number of people they have?
We presented IFAS with a menu for funding REC workshops, and they seemed to be interested in all of the options.
Geraldine is still working on the statistics to look at departmental representation at UF Carpentry workshops.
Why not just do a focussed workshop for each organization? Because otherwise that might be all the workshops we do in the year, and we really want to do open workshops.
Given how much of a success the EPI workshop was, we should approach them to see if they want to be part of this.
We get $3750 from UFII.
Current plan: we open half the seats early and then all the sponsoring groups get an e-mail telling them to register.
Geraldine will try to get the data on how much each organization has benefited from UF Carpentries, which will be a valuable part of that pitch
IFAS support for future REC workshops
Need-based scholarship / fee reduction
Our next workshop is free anyway, but a couple of months before our next paid workshop is the latest when we should sort this out.
So this decision needs to be made next meeting.
The money is available, so it would be nice to do it.
Assessing the need will be tricky.
Maybe a letter from the advisor saying that alternate funding is not available?
What about doing it randomly?
We hold two seats and make a list of people who can’t afford the registration fee, and then pick them randomly.
We don’t have a sense of how many people are actually being turned away by this.
Backup laptops for workshop attendees
Ethan White has two unused laptops lying around the lab
As long as we’re willing to wipe them and
You could use Marston Science Library Room L308 (seats 25), set up with R, Python, not sure about Git Bash – but Academic Technology could install anything we need.
One problem: we want to encourage students to bring their own laptops, so this would really be just be for people who run into problems
We probably need to book this room around a month in advance
Social media / website guidance
R Ladies guidelines are pretty straightforward and common sense
It would be nice if everybody has access to Twitter, so it’s easier for instructors to link
Gaurav to write this up #TODO
The site is pretty dynamic now: we should link to the events straightaway on the main page
A link to the page with the statistics would be useful!
chair and secretary for next meeting (May 14)
Elise will be secretary next
We need a chair - Simona will take over (confirmed) the chairing duties for next time
Action items
Next board meeting, we should have our plans for asking the funding organizations for money to fund our membership renewal.
