2021-10-27 Board Meeting

UF Carpentries Meeting Minutes

tags: UF Carpentries Meeting

:::info

• Location: Remote
• Date: October 27, 2021 12:00 PM (ET)

• Agenda

  1. Introductions
  2. Approve minutes from 2021-09-15 Board meeting (tabled last meeting)
  3. Approve minutes from 2021-10-14 Board meeting
• Participants:
  • Trista Brophy, Cory Brunson, Audrey Smith, Amobichukwu Amanambu, Narayani Barve, Caitlin Campbell, Amanda Markee, Vijay Barve
• Meeting Chair: Trista
• Meeting Secretary: Cory

:::

Notes

The meeting was rescheduled from Monday, October 25. The chair followed the agenda at the Coordination repo.

Introductions

All attendees were acquainted so introductions were skipped.

Approve minutes from 2021-09-15 Board meeting

All who attended approved the minutes.

Approve minutes from 2021-10-14 Board meeting

All who attended approved the minutes.

Further discussion of member roles

All members who volunteered for specific roles at the last meeting confirmed that they remain interested in them.

Amanda confirmed to become Carpentries Coordinator.

Audrey and Trista clarified that report-writing responsibilities may be shared or rotated so long as they are coordinated and assisted by the Data Manager.

Review club’s GitHub and Google Drive

Audrey and Amobi have invited everyone to the GitHub repository, though some may still need to accept the invitation.

Trista has added everyone to the Google Drive, which all at the meeting checked.

Sponsors for 2021/22 AY

Vijay confirmed that our membership is paid for this year. We need to fundraise for the coming year, and we should contact past and potential sponsors soon.

Trista, Vijay, and Narayani explained that some files in the “Support” folder in Google Drive were not renamed to reflect the year they refer to, and that the files should be better organized, which will be a task for Cory. The past sponsor and potential sponsor documents will be given a sheet for each academic year, each of which will include a new column for whether and how each organization responded.

All board members should review the template letters, which need to be updated with the numbers of workshops and of attendees.

All board members should look among the past and potential sponsors for those they would be comfortable approaching, and leave their names in the document (for this academic year) to claim those sponsors (to avoid duplication).

We will return to this topic at the next meeting.

Workshop follow-up

Narayani suggested that we take this meeting as an opportunity to debrief on the organization and planning of the recent workshop, since most instructors and helpers are present.

A major issue was that many fewer people attended than registered, and that fewer still stayed until the last session. We discussed several changes to make for future workshops:

• Open registration at least one week earlier to allow time to confirm with registrants that they will certainly attend (Narayani)
• Increase capacity from 35 to 50 (Vijay)
• Charge a nominal fee of, say, $10 (Trista)
• Use the fees collected to reward by lot one participant who attends all sessions (Vijay)

Audrey suggested allowing registrants to register for specific sessions rather than only the whole workshop. The idea was positively received.

Narayani suggested offering separate workshops that would reduce the steep curve of the previous workshop. One would be an introduction to R and the other would introduce data science packages (tidyverse). This idea was positively received, and all agreed that both would be 2-day workshops.

Cory suggested organizing such workshops in late November and in December of this year. The second would be promoted at the first. Vijay and Narayani agreed that this would be feasible. Trista reminded that we can invite instructors and helpers from the broader Carpentries lists, and also that we would be able to host a workshop organized by the Carpentries, which comes with our membership. Vijay suggested that we should have a solid plan for both workshops prepared at the next meeting.

Registering our workshops with the Carpentries

Trista explained that we have not been registering our events with the Carpentries, which would allow instuctors and helpers to build credit toward becoming voting members in the Carpentries. This requires at least one instructor at each workshop being certified, which most of the current board are not yet. She offered to preparee notes about this and send them out.

In general, Trista urged us to talk more about taking advantages of the resources provided by the Carpentries that our membership pays for. In past we decided to swap between two levels of membership. Currently we are at the Silver level, which grants us four Carpentries-coordinated workshops per year. Vijay suggested that we should take advantage of these to cover topics the board does not have expertise in.

Any updates on Genomics workshop

Board members who previously orgnized and instructed this workshop will not be available.

Trista suggested that we use one Carpentries-organized workshop to host a genomics workshop.

Amanda has experience with genomics and transcriptomics and offered to help coordinate this workshop, though not necessarily to teach it. Vijay suggested contacting previous instructors to discuss.

Next time

Wednesday at 12:00 was agreed to as a suitable meeting time.

The next meeting is scheduled for November 10. Audrey will serve as chair and Narayani will serve as secretary.