By Aleksandra Pawlik, Training Leader
Last week the Institute in collaboration with the North West University, Cape Town University and Talarify helped run the first face-to-face Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training. 23 new instructors from South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya attended the event. After the workshop the Institute's work was also presented at the Association of South African University Directors of Information Technology (ASAUDIT) Autumn General Institutional Meeting.
The Institute's training activities have received a lot of interest from various international projects and institutions focusing on supporting research.
This Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training workshop was the first one from a series of three workshops run in Australia and New Zealand. In both countries the growing demand for Software and Data Carpentry training meant that there was a need to grow instructor pool on the Southern Hemisphere. Aleksandra Pawlik who is one of the instructor trainers was invited to run these workshops in January 2016.
This Instructor Training was a part of an ELIXIR pilot project for rolling out Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry within ELIXIR Nodes. 20 new instructors based in 7 different countries were trained during this two day event which took place 13-14th January 2016.
The end of 2015 saw the first Software Carpentry workshop for Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) in the UK. The Institute co-organised the event together with Women in HPC, ARCHER, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) and ELIXIR UK. 34 participants attended the workshop and we also had a waiting list. The event was generously sponsored by Intel, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and ELIXIR UK.
This first workshop received a lot of interest from female researchers from different organisations in the UK. The attendees were from various disciplines ranging from life sciences,…
By Clare Playforth, Library assistant, The Library University of Sussex
I want to express how important I think software skills are for people who work in libraries and how I feel like more value should be placed on their development. We are in the business of information, creating it, archiving it, retrieving it, curating it and delivering it, so it is a constant source of mystery to me that we are often so bad at working with the systems, processes and software that enable this.
I accept that there are many different reasons that you might want to work in the information…
By Mateusz Kuzak, Netherlands eScience Center
At the Netherlands eScience Center we aim to share as much code as possible between our diverse research projects. We also want to share our code with research communities. One of the reasons why we do this is to increase sustainability of our software, by extending its life beyond the life of our projects.
How to practically approach this goal? What makes software easy or hard to take and reuse for your own project? What makes it easy to contribute to and to improve it?
By Aleksandra Pawlik, the Institute's Training Leader.