2020-03-31 Board Meeting

Agenda

• Approve minutes from March 17, 2020 board meeting: https://www.uf-carpentries.org/minutes/board-2020-03-17/
• Geospatial workshop
  • Set date
  • Decide on fees
  • Registration limit
  • Technology plan
  • Resources for teaching online carpentries workshops
• Genomics workshop: canceled
• UCF update
• Custom pre-workshop survey
  • Possible to modify affiliation question(s) through DOCE?
  • Question(s) about workshop fees?
• Travel awards: any additional action required right now?
• Annual report (for IFAS, etc.) update

Notes

• Attendees: Board members: Carla, Vratika, Eve, Brian, Jenicca
• Non-board members: Alethea, Dimitri, Felipe

Approve minutes from March 17, 2020 board meeting

• Minutes approved

Geospatial workshop

• Date:
  • previously discussed early May in last mtg
  • Eve: organizer of the workshop
  • Early May, stick with Mon/Tues
  • May 18/19th or 25/26th?
  • or do we want the week where they don’t have classes (May 4/5)?
  • Felipe will be available to teach
    • any of the dates in May will work for him, even if field work resumes
  • Decided: May 18/19th
• Fees: previously discussed $5 or free
  • Suggestion, it’s an optional fee, but no fee required, but if it’s a donation, it changes how Alethea goes about collecting them
  • So, free is better than donation based
  • If attendance is an issue, we can send emails the week before to have them verify that they will be attending, highlight that we have a waitlist
  • Decided: no registration fee
• Registration limit: prev. discussed 25 cap
  • Could we split into a group of “active” and “passive” group of participants? might be tricky to pull off, offering a recording will likely decrease people’s participation
  • Let’s try a small group to start
  • Should we follow Jason Bell’s recommendation for a cap at 12
  • Decided: cap at 12
• Techology plan
  • Use zoom
  • Dual screens would be ideal, or split screen with one monitor, so they have one instructors window and another window for RStudio, etc.
  • Encourage people to have video, notify them in the early intro email that they are encouraged to use video, recommend them to self-mute
  • Remote control feature is very useful
    • remote control allows for troubleshooting to become a learning experience and also many people might have the same problem
  • Hands up and hands down option instead of sticky notes; “raise hand” feature; or there are zoom surveys - could trial some of these at the next board meeting
  • We can do a trial run for the workshop tools during the next board meeting
  • Will just do our regular registration link through DOCE
• Resources for teaching online caprentries workshop
  • Discussion of Jason Bell’s presentation re: virtual carpentries workshop
    • Brian’s notes https://docs.google.com/document/d/1epyW60ezhNVAq_D46SbBg0FBCIp2gKXsBOo8fPUhFuk/edit
    • Caps at 12 participants
    • Hard to have 1 instructor managing the zoom chat with a high number of participants
    • For “time wasters” (people who show up unprepared, not engaged), he actually blacklisted people and stopped them from participating in future workshops, never actually have to use that
      • may be too extreme, but could be clear upfront, if people don’t download the programs, they’re not allowed to participate in that section
      • Also don’t spend any time in workshops in software installation, people should ask for help before the workshop starts
      • or could do pre-workshop meeting/zoom call to help with setup on the Sunday before, and specify that there will be no help setting up on Monday morning
        • Felipe will be available to help with this as well

Genomics workshop

• Decided to cancel
• Felt like there would be a lot of problems with online workshops due to different machines, etc.

REC workshop

• center is closed until further notice, Jenicca will be trying to head home, fall would be better, Jennica’s heard that people want a more advanced (level II) geospatial workshop
• Jenicca could send out survey for them to see what material they’d like to cover

UCF Update

• Carla got back to them with the information they requested, but has not heard back from them yet

Custom pre-workshop survey

• Should try to use it before the geospatial workshop
• Brian added financial questions
• There’s no extensive list of UF departments
• Narrow it down specifially to top departments, OR do we want college level?
• Want it at Dept. level, will get top 10 or 20 affiliations and then an “Other” option with a text box to fill in
• Elise will track down the old financial survey, and will look into the shared drive to find list of top dept. affiliations
• If we have UF emails, we can try to look at their affiliations that way
  • want to be careful with how we use UFIDs

Travel awards

• Everyone agrees that if student travel plans change due to COVID, they can still use the travel award, but just need to let the board know what other conference they would like to use it for.

Annual report update

• Eve waiting for further comments, or additional graphs
• Brian working on graphs

Next meeting

Chair: Secretary: Carla