lgatto / sc-ics-proposal

Software Carpentry ICS proposal

Software Carpentry ICS proposal

The R consortium invites the community to submit ISC Proposals:

The goal of the Infrastructure Steering Committee (the ISC) is to support projects that broadly help the R community. This might be software development, developing new teaching materials, documenting best practices, standardising APIs or doing research. Currently, the ISC chiefly provides financial support for projects proposed by individuals or teams who have the skills to carry out the work, but we can also provide administrative support, promotion and some collaboration tools for groups who would like to study more ambitious projects.

The proposal was submitted on Friday 8 January.

Good news, we got the grant!

Outputs

• The course was run in Cambridge, on the 19-20 September 2016, and was lead by Karin Lagesen and Steve Crouch.

• Here's a blog post about the course.

• Some outputs/exercises from the course.

• Slides for the ISC Project Status Webinar.

Who

• Laurent Gatto
• John Blishak
• Greg Wilson
• David LeBauer
• Jonah Duckles

If you have questions or comments, please open an issue.

sc-ics-proposal's Issues

Target audience versus content for instructor training

The proposal is off to a good start. The main decision I think that needs to be made is how much the proposed instructor training will contain new R-specific content. Software Carpentry has a well-established instructor training course that covers lots of content. The main problem with the current system is that instructor training is a huge bottleneck. Because of this bottleneck, and the fact that the current pool of SWC instructors are mostly Python programmers, we have a limited capability to run R-based SWC workshops. Thus at minimum, this proposal is simply to run the current SWC instructor training verbatim, but with the target audience being comprised entirely of R programmers. Certifying more R programmers as SWC instructors will lead to more R-based SWC workshops and thus more scientists/engineers using R.

I think the goal of "Certify more R programmers as SWC instructors" should be the main goal of the proposal. Additionally, I could imagine one extra R-specific module being added to the current instructor training. Some ideas for topics:

• Teaching with the RStudio IDE
• Vectorization
• Exploring the currently available R lessons (inflammation, gapminder)

Costing

We normally charge $10K for a one-off instructor training event for non-partners, but I'm sure we could knock it down somewhat for a good cause like this.

@gvwilson could you elaborate on the budget - I think we probably need a bit more details to justify the resource.

In-person training location

@jduckles suggested

Perhaps at a major conference of R users?

That's a good idea. The next useR meeting will be in Stanford at the end of June 2016. This might be short notice, but I will get in touch with the organisers. There will be a useR in 2017, but that's a bit too far away.

These conferences are often quite busy; the R/Bioconductor conference is also tagged onto useR this year. Instructor trainings are also quite intense, which makes me wonder if it wouldn't be counter productive.

Let's keep this open for now. I will discuss the possibilities in the proposal.