foreign
[Music]
good morning everybody
today we have Liz Stokes talking for us
today
um doing the presentation Hammer Time
building carpentry communities in
Australia
list Stokes is an enthusiastic company
of Bill champion of building community
and peer learning and open research
tools and software at the Australia
research data Commons they lead a
partnership National Partnership with
the carpentries an organization which
aims to effectively teach foundational
coding and data science skills to
researchers
this is talk we'll discuss why people
become carpentries instructors what
programming challenges researchers face
and what key things make a difference
when you're building a supportive
Community please welcome Liz
[Applause]
thank you everyone and thanks for
bearing with me as we start a bit late
that's my fault I'm perennially running
late
so woman Jacker which means welcome I'm
excited to learn I'd like to begin by
acknowledging the warranty Warren people
of the kulin Nations the traditional
custodians of the lands of nam I also
want to extend that acknowledgment to
the traditional custodians of the lands
where you're from I grew up on Stolen
we're ready country and I live and work
on the gadigal lands of the Euro people
I play pay my respects to Elders past
and present and extend my respects to
any First Nations people in the room
today
okay so my keenest desire for the next
45 minutes is to make good on all my
promises in the abstract that I sent
earlier this year
caveat that might not happen but let's
see that that's what question time is
for right okay there must be something
that acceptance means there must be
something in the abstract that was
intriguing or particularly wrong perhaps
like asserting that stop collaborate and
listen are indeed in fact not M.C hammer
lyrics but Vanilla Ice
so I'm really looking forward to what
your opinions about this is and what
questions around this partnership you
may have in fact
um yeah so look I started with um MC
Hammer and this idea of hammer time as
an appropriate metaphor for the
carpentries which are in fact not a
carpentry
um physical tooling with wood process
but a an organization that teaches
foundational coding and data science
skills to research communities worldwide
I would like you to consider me as
something like a theremin player for the
purposes of this talk you know
I am merely a conductor perhaps I could
say I'm a semiconductor
yes you're with me
good okay so of ideas connections which
represent the shared Endeavors of the
money many wonderful community
volunteers and participants that are all
involved in in the carpentries and
Beyond okay so my model for today's talk
is a mullet as you can see there
um okay the mullet this uh you know uh
also from the 80s or and indeed some of
the early 90s mullet was a popular
hairstyle and it was often referred to
as something where you had business in
the front and a party in the back and so
that's my model for today so the
business in the front is going to tell
you about tell you a lot about ardc my
organization tell you about the
carpentries one of our RDC
recent products called uh dresser and
then do the party in the back which is
the extended metaphor of stop
collaborate and listen Okay stop
um which is why researchers want to
become carpentry's instructors
collaborate what programming challenges
do
researchers face and thinking about what
key things make a difference when
building community
that last one listen is kind of peppered
throughout the talk and is not anyway a
reason
um because I couldn't finish the last
slide
okay so what's the carpentries and Arc
got to do Got to Do with It
um that's a reference to Tina Turner and
that's how I learn actually if I can
make a pun or a joke about something
even if it's terrible
especially if it's terrible I know that
I'm learning and to me that emphasizes
one of the really important things about
skill sharing and something that is
critical to building trainer capacity
and that is that enablement is a social
Endeavor so the problem that we're
trying to solve is that there is a big
computational skills gap for researchers
across Australia indeed the world and we
want to make it easier for them to do
the right thing in terms of managing
their research data and the software
that they write to
um
do things with their to access do things
with that data
I'd like to give a shout out to Donna
Benjamin here who for introducing that
concept of enablement which refers to
that social side of
um of upskilling a Workforce
so let's get down to business so the
next few slides are going to be fairly
sort of Business Heavy and a lot of
feature a lot of
um
logos
who here has heard of the ardc can I see
your hand a smattering okay cool a bit
groovy okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna dive
into some of our um uh who we are and
our reason for being
the ardc was established under the
Australian government's National
collaborative research infrastructure
strategy we know this is interest in
2019 this National research
infrastructure could be a physical
instrument like an electronic microscope
or it could be a service like
manufacturing of nanotechnology it could
be digital like Cloud compute as it
tends to be bigger in scale than any
single
um or group of universities could
provide their researchers
ardc is now a not performing Company
Limited by guarantee which along with 25
other organizations supported by encris
that you can see here provide National
research infrastructure for Australian
researchers interesting fact for this
community here the directors these
anchors directors recently put out a
paper calling for a separate category or
employment category for research
infrastructure Specialists arguing that
the current eba's folk work well for
professional staff and academic staff at
universities but they they don't respond
to the particular needs and career
development of people working in
research infrastructure so when I
eventually share these slides there's a
link there to that paper which you may
find interesting
okay
so we have who are these member
organizations
um these we have 21 member organizations
nine of which host our staff across
Australia
so what is a research data Commons okay
so while we're called the Australian
research data Commons uh what we want to
do is build National research data
Commons
for Australia our purpose as we see it
is to provide Australian researchers
with the competitive advantage through
data and we accelerate research and
Innovation by driving excellence in the
creation analysis and retention of high
quality data assets
no one can do any of this unless they
have the skills to use that
infrastructure which is where we come in
I work for the skills and Workforce
Development team in the trainer and my
focus here on this wheel is over in
section five Community leadership with
respect to the trainer communities of
Australia we have found that the
training Community for digital research
skills is often disconnected time poor
siled within research institutions and
unable to find best practice training
materials
at this point I would also like to give
a shout out to some of the open
credentials of ardc and that is to flag
here that our nectar team who run a
research Cloud use openstack and are
part of the open infra Foundation
what's also interesting about this slide
here is that two of our nodes qsf the
Queensland cyber infrastructure
foundation and intersect uh significant
trainer organizations for the research
sector and their foundational members of
our partnership that we run they play a
really key role in in that
okay here's my transitional slide
where I move away from my material from
the comms team and into my own slides
okay so I like to think about skills
training as a Rubik's Cube It's
Complicated and brightly colored
the transition point is that I would
like to um I want to spend my time on
the hands what the hands are doing how
the hands are solving the problem okay
it's not about the abstract con Concepts
it's how do we you know work together
right okay to in order to solve the cube
and what are we doing to
um increase the efficacy of skills
trainers in doing that
okay so now it's time to talk about the
carpentries
so they're a non-profit global volunteer
organization that trains people in
software development and data science
skills they build community and local
capacity through a train the Train the
program and that's what I'm going to
that's essentially the reason why we
started this partnership to give people
easier access to becoming a carpentry's
instructor
the focus for the carpentries is on
novice Learners and also how to teach
them so and I'll get into some of those
factors now
so there are three lesson program
areas to the carpentries software
carpentry data and Library
software carpentry is for people who are
learning to code to develop software so
it tends to focus and be fairly domain
independent
data carpentry workshops tend to be
domain targeted where and teach
researchers to work more effectively and
reproducibly with
discipline focused data sets and Library
carpentry workshops are for people who
want to build software and data skills
managing collections so this is where
um this might be of interest to people
across the Glam sector galleries
libraries archives and museums equally
some Humanities social science
researchers may find the library
carpentry curricula more relevant to
them
and
the idea about calling all of this
carpentries is that we use it to refer
to the basics like learning how to nail
two boards together or putting up a wall
straight
so the idea is after attending a
carpentry's workshop researchers are
enabled to come back to this um this
this computational area themselves with
the confidence to try something new
okay why do we choose the carpentries to
uplift the trainer Community let's look
at the market landscape for digital
skills training against two key drivers
you've Community coming up the vertical
axis and
um open and reproducible methods coming
along the bottom access axis
okay so you can see up in the up in the
top right the carpentry is there stored
out as
um
coming out on top for both of those
areas
in fact both raspberries and there is a
raspberry slide in here because I will
always I will always put one in
so I'll explain that if it's unfamiliar
to you offer that networking and
collaboration both of those are about
paying attention to the social nature of
learning and doing research
so the first reason we initiated a
partnership was because individual
organization memberships were not
growing in the community actually that
might have been something I forgot to
mention previously that while the
carpentries is a volunteer organization
they receive grant funding from their
fiscally sponsored initiative from this
an organization called Community
initiatives in the United States and
then organizations become members and
that pays the and those fees sustain the
organization
so what we wanted to do is was create
reasons for local coordination to renew
and grow the existing instructor
community and also to encourage
collaboration between institutions and
broker relationships between them it's
one of those problems about trained
digital skills trainers being isolated
and siled and not recognized in their
official capacity is that you know
they're they're all
um well they because they were siled so
we wanted to create a reason for those
people to come together and contribute
to a a broader community
we also wanted to build capacity for
digital research skills among Australian
researchers and service providers for
example qcf and intersect and also
increase the efficacy of digital skills
trainers through the Train the trainer
program which features pedagogical
Theory evidence-based practice and
evaluation and assessment
so these are some of the organizations
in our partnership so people become a
partner join our partnership because
they want a number of instructors
trained per year
um
we so we take out the membership that's
on ardc and then we we on sell seats
um in in that capacity
um our our reach across Australia
um also in addition to those two major
uh training organizations includes two
HPC centers and we have representing
representation from universities from
west to east and research infrastructure
from ardc and Arnett the New Kids on the
Block uh the Burnett Institute and Ames
Australian Institute of Marine Science
and we're finding more interest growing
from smaller groups or you know on a lab
site almost a lab size interest rather
than a a big Institution
okay last year here are our five
instructor trainers so we call them
trainers by for short and these trainers
taught 80 brought 85 researchers and
research support people through our
training last year
I'm gonna tell you uh and these are the
numbers of of or that's the geographical
spread of where we reached people
so one of the things that I do want to
highlight is some of that assessment
process so when
um
when people go through their undertake
their instructor training which is
usually about 16 hours of workshop and
that's typically online
we also require them to participate
online in a community discussion to
submit a contribution to a lesson repo
on GitHub and also to pass an online
teaching demonstration which trainers
such as myself assess people on
if you are interested so there are two
ways that you might could get involved
in this kind of instructor training if
you're starting to see some of these
skills being interested being relevant
to you one of those is for you to talk
to your organization about membership
taking out a carpentry's membership or
you could also come in through the open
instructor eoi process so I can show you
how to get to that form so on the
carpentry's website but sort of sort of
hidden a bit
okay
right well here's the question in the
room why do people become instructors
often it's to gain greater insight into
the tools that they're using the older
age you don't really know something
until you've tried to teach someone else
is relevant here so going a little bit
deeper some of those skills that we
teach are about get and using GitHub the
Unix shell
Python and R and there are new there is
new curriculum developing all the time
but there are other benefits to to the
community that the carpentry support and
that includes by becoming a volunteer it
means you learn how to interact and
learn a lot of interpersonal skills
because you interact with a wide range
of Learners from a big range of
backgrounds we are a a global
organization
you can also gain useful perspectives
and adaptability through teaching
audiences with different levels of skill
and also to develop research and
teaching in insights by instructors
learning Learners instructing Learners
in disciplines other than your own
the other reason I reckon people stay
involved
or get involved in the carpentries is
that idea of serendipity and I'm going
to use the example of res Bears to
explain what I mean by Serendipity so
for those of you unfamiliar with res
Buzz it's short for research bizarre
started in Melbourne Melbourne uni
started it off in 2015 and since then it
has grown to be a very decentralized
bunch of conferences for researchers
that are all about bringing people
together to access and learn about new
tools and Technology solve practical
problems so we can translate research to
society
um
so one thing that's great about resvers
because it tends to be City based and
in-person event
is that you get people from different
disciplines different institutions all
in the same room and you're in a
learning environment together so you are
able to access that Serendipity of oh my
goodness we have exactly the same
problem even though we're at you know
either completely different disciplines
and I wouldn't have met you otherwise or
we do exactly the same thing but we're
at different institutions so that kind
of serendipity that you get out of
coming together with a bunch of friendly
strangers who are all committed to
um to building a community and have an
interest in open tools and scholarship
is probably something that everyone here
knows about because you've been doing it
by coming to this conference and that's
also why people join the carpentries as
well in fact rezbez was formed on the
basis of running
carpentry's workshops for at scale okay
in a in a festival kind of environment
and and it continues but that's not the
topic of my talk unfortunately
so coming back to what I was trying to
make myself do
um okay so now it's the party time
but I think that kind of gives you false
expectations about the quality of my
slides from here on in
what programming challenges do
researchers face I'm not an expert and I
think you probably have a really good
idea of this yourself
from my experience
one of the chief problems are how do I
get started you know how do I learn
these skills how do I even know that
these skills are relevant to me if I
want to be able to access this research
infrastructure and and not piss off the
developers and the tech support so so
there's that problem space
then there's also where can I find
support so it is really hard for
researchers to find and access the
relevant people folk who are available
to support them in their in their Tech
Endeavors at universities
and that's where things like and I'll
I'll move into uh some examples of stuff
that ardc is doing to make visible that
information
the final challenge here that I've got
on this screen is about that concept of
research quality software which seems to
be something that many people here know
about and grown as much as they do
towards my terrible funds
so um encapsulated here I've called it
my code is not good enough oh
my code is good enough for research but
not good enough for sharing don't people
don't want to see it
um and that's that's one of the big
challenges that we face
um in my sort of data librarian capacity
uh teaching data sharing and Publishing
skills that people don't want to share
data and don't want to share softly
mainly because they're embarrassed about
what the committee might think when they
show it to each other so there's
there's a thing
um that I'll may I hopefully we'll come
back to later in in the summary
okay so a couple of things that ardc are
doing
um here
one of them is this portal
but realistically it's a metadata
aggregator called dreza you could call
it dresser but I think I'm just going to
go full Bogan and call it dreza
I grew up near Bogan gate so I reserve
the right to um
own that Bogan and reform it from the
inside
um okay so what dreza hopes to do it's a
it's a portal it's a place for you
probably can't see that um tiny line
there browsing discovering and
organizing digital research skills
events and training resources collected
from australasian providers so it's in
fact it's authenticated by aaf in
Australia and in New Zealand it's
um
I always forget the name of it
um
no I can't remember starts with a t
might have to re-record that section of
the talk
um so what dresser hopes to do is to
aggregate that information from as many
Australian Australian and New Zealand
training events as possible into one
portal and make it a you know a
meaningful place to start for
researchers looking to find out what
skills they need and what
what training and support is available
to them so we
um so we pull that metadata from all of
that from existing sites and put it
together there's also a place for
trainers to create their own profile so
if you indeed are a trainer or have a
trainer capacity in your role I really
encourage you to talk to me about um
creating a trainer profile
and how we might bulk ingest your
training calendar that kind of thing
the other thing that I would like to
share with this is the the hilariously
named ardc software program okay which
which is a program but it's not that
kind of program and
two big things that the software program
does is a um is running a visible
research software interest group and
they've got a ask me anything meeting
coming up at the end of this month I'd
like to encourage you to go to and also
they have sponsored or we have sponsored
a Eureka prize for excellence in
research software so this is exciting
because it's ten thousand dollars
and it's a it's something that is for
anyone involved in Risk in building
research software so you could be you
could be an academic but you or a
researcher but you could also be a
research software engineer and you would
be welcome to apply for that price so I
encourage you to explore that or as the
side says enter now
all right
okay so oh I don't have notes there so
here we go what have I learned about
Community Building
these are three out of the many things
that I have learned um because I did I
did want to get to one of you know what
are those critical things involved in
building a building community and
um
oh this is weird because uh often I I
feel that it's a liability of mine to
not be able to work out what the
priority is at any one time because
everything is important we must do
everything but there are a lot of moving
parts and so getting buy-in from
organizations at that sort of senior
level is important but equally important
is paying attention to the community
Grassroots communities on the ground and
listening to what the community why you
are building communities
and for me that means paying attention
to that social side of learning one of
the great things about the carpentries
that I I love to Champion is how good
they are at Social infrastructure so
they have regular Community they're a
Regional Community calls that happen to
help people come together and know who's
who in their local communities and when
I say local in that context actually it
kind of means
National groupings across the world
there's also a Convention of running pre
and post workshop debriefs for
instructors so that you can talk with
other instructors about oh I'm I'm about
to run a workshop for you know data
carpentry genomics workshop and I'm
gonna I'm gonna use work on this
particular curricula and I'm going to
cut this other stuff what do you think
of my plans and also it works for a
debrief as well so instructors are
welcome to come in and talk about how
they're using that and of course there
are many roles across the carpentries
whether you get involved in maintaining
the open source curriculum or um
as as a maintainer or as a community
coordinator as well
so I guess finally
um this is really just a a bullet point
for me that mistakes mean that you're
learning so I'm pleased to say I now
know the difference between the lyrics
of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice
and
um and
that's that's where I'm that's where I'm
at so here's our subscribe to the ardc
connect newsletter business
and you can please come and talk to me
about any of these questions or I look
forward to your questions because I feel
like I've just given you a lot of
information here and this this could be
the start of a beautiful Journey
exploration
and I don't know Hammer Time thank you
[Applause]
oh okay cool have you got any questions
yes
thanks Liz oh thanks Liz great talk
um the you talked a little bit about you
know
the community side of it and and that
there's all you know there's a lot of
moving parts and the prioritization
piece
talk more a little bit about that and
how how do you how do you choose what to
do next like what kind of prioritization
approaches do you use
damn
so the question was how do I um how do I
prioritize what to do next in the in
that Community Building kind of space
and talk more about it I suppose that
could
um I can answer that
I will answer that
so last year
um we established our partnership we had
11 partner organizations and we
basically went on this big drive to get
lots of people in through our instructor
training and it was it was really
intense because there was
um while we
we went out and sourced people who were
to get that instructor training from
across Australia but when our trainers
run our training they also run training
which can be attended by other members
or instructor trainees from other member
organizations there are about 110 member
organizations across the carpentry's
worldwide so
that meant that we spent a lot of time
focused on just delivering the
instructor training okay and so by the
end of the year I was exhausted and
resolved never to run a training event
in December ever again
this year our um so in answer to
bringing back to your question about
like how do you decide what to do next
we've now we have a whole bunch of
people who've gone through the training
some of them have made it through to
full certified instructor status
um probably about a third of them
actually so it it's still one of so our
next big job is to help them through
that and so the things that we're doing
to help them through that process is to
start up some Australian New Zealand
regular Community calls
it's one coming up in mid-april
and start and pay more attention to what
it takes to help an instructor deliver
their first Workshop so there's often a
sense when you run a train the train in
a program that
all you need is an organization who's
going to pay the fee and then people
attend the training and then they're
good to go
but what I've learned through the
carpentry's involvement is that like
that's actually just the first step and
then you need to really engage in a a
much deeper instructor onboarding
program to find for people at that local
level for them to find well who can who
can I encourage or ask nicely to do the
registration and the organizing of the
administration around the workshops and
how can I convince my
my bosses to allow my peers to have time
off to attend these workshops or to have
spend staff time joining these workshops
so that's that's where we're going and
in fact I would I would like to do less
training this year and focus more on
moving those people into
demonstrating or sort of you know
walking the talk of
um what what they've learned last year
how's that for an answer a bit more
thank you
um as one of you could speak to the
relationship between carpentries as a
training organization that's not doesn't
sound like it's necessarily closed but
at least his membership driven and
internal like that and the open sort of
an open Community like like the free and
open source Community more generally the
relationship between the resources that
you've got the or the the ways that we
can collaborate as without necessarily
becoming full members of a carpentry
organization or if open source
communities can have access to materials
without necessarily having access to
specific training sessions is there any
relationship here that that to be to be
built on or grown or is it a uh
sufficiently closed that the people in
this room who aren't already members of
those organizations could participate
yeah that's a good question okay so your
question is about how do you talk more
right okay and why how how can you how
can you get involved without necessarily
becoming a member organizational or you
know strong-arming your senior admin
into paying the fees yeah
um so so yes because all of the
curriculum is um
uh is openly licensed there it all has a
um an attribution Creative Commons
attributions license and is hosted on
GitHub in fact I think it's you know
GitHub carpentries is the major
repository there and and you can filter
through and find things and so that the
the maintenance of that lesson
curriculum is all run by run through
GitHub so anyone is welcome to pop in
and comment on an issue or
um and indeed use the curriculum so you
can you can definitely Fork it and
adjust it for your own own needs the
membership part really focuses in if you
want to um if you want to make use of
those materials at scale among your
organization because then you can say
that you're running a carpentry's
workshop because you've got carpentry's
certified instructors to run it
so I guess that's the reason for the
membership tier
yes yes trademark exactly thanks for
bringing that up
um
uh alternatively there are even in the
in the trainer in the instructor
training space you can
um join in through the open scholarship
program so if your organization doesn't
have the wherewithal and you want to do
it on your own time you are more than
welcome to submit a new expression of
interest in those training programs and
then that gets assessed by the
instructor training team
and I think because of the nature of
what the carpentries teach
um you know whether it's teaching python
or R teaching those teaching these
skills about how to build build software
and and use work in ways that are open I
mean from their point of view it's from
the it's building you know
reproducibility skills among researchers
but it's not only researchers who
researchers are not the only people who
have these skills at all by any means so
I guess it's about building that
Community but I would say the
um the open source Community
an open source software and development
Community is more than welcome to chip
in
with your expertise or explore ways that
um that could could work you know
outside of that volunteer your time
so sorry everybody that's uh
out of time so everybody give another
round of applause for this
thank you
[Applause]