2019-04-30 Board Meeting

Attendees

  • Chair: Hao
  • Secretary: Gaurav
  • Board Members: Joe, Elise, Geraldine
  • Non-board Members: Alethea Geiger, Adam Rivers, Daniel Maxwell, Dimitri Bourilkov

Agenda

  • Approve last week’s minutes - UF-Carpentry/website#35
  • Status of travel awards
  • Status of logo design
  • TREC workshop (currently underway)
  • Biodiversity Research Workshop (2019, May 7)
  • ResBaz planning
    • coordination with other groups (UF Libraries, UF DSI, UF Innovation Hub, Gainesville R-Ladies, ??)
  • Long-term community building strategy
  • Long-term workshop schedule
    • UF/USDA workshop (August?)
  • Funding for Carpentries membership renewal
    • IFAS support for future REC workshops
  • Need-based scholarship / fee reduction
  • Backup laptops for workshop attendees
  • Social media / website guidance
  • chair and secretary for next meeting (May 14)

Notes

  • Approve last week’s minutes - UF-Carpentry/website#35
    • Approved
  • Status of travel awards (Joe)
    • Only one submission, to be reviewed and approved/rejected soon
    • Maybe the criteria is too restrictive? (only 23 people were eligible)
      • Maybe we should revise the cutoffs?
    • Maybe because its finals week?
    • Or because it was after people had already planned and funding summer travel
      • We should aim to get the travel awards out earlier
    • Maybe for long-term sustainability, we should avoid board members taking all the instructor slots
    • Unallocated money can roll over for next travel award selection (could do this in early Fall)
  • Status of logo design (Elise)
    • We should be aware about UF’s rules on branding
    • Discussions on Slack, we’ll vote on it next time
    • There’s someone in the University Relations office who we can e-mail to ask about our logos
  • TREC workshop (currently underway)
    • Looks like it’s going well!
  • Biodiversity Research Workshop (2019, May 7) (Geraldine, Gaurav)
    • Next week!
    • Agreed on how to shorten the curriculum
    • Need to check what’s going on with the location and the food
    • We need to organize curriculum-specific training tips
      • Gaurav will work on this
  • ResBas planning (Hao, Joe, Elise)
    • coordination with other groups (UF Libraries, UF DSI, UF Innovation Hub, Gainesville R-Ladies, ??)
    • Hao has written a document
    • Part of the Research Bazaar 2019
    • We plan to set up a task force to deal with this
    • 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.

Updated: