2020-06-16 Board Meeting

Agenda

  • Approval of meeting minutes: https://www.uf-carpentries.org/minutes/board-2020-06-02/

  • REC workshop preparation new dates- 4 day distributed workshop: https://uf-carpentry.github.io/2020-06-29-IFAS_REC_ecology/
  • Reporting of UFCC stats to funders: Status and tasks etc

Notes

Approval of meeting minutes

  • Notes approved
  • Workshop misspelled, Brian fixed

REC workshop: Announcing

  • Are we ready to send out the workshop announcement?
    • For same workshop but over two weeks, do we want two registration links?
    • Or have them register for the parts of the workshop they want to register for?
    • Eve told Alethea that we would have one registration link
    • 20 people cap, if a certain number of people don’t show up over the whole time, then it’s not a problem
    • Registering twice could be confusing
  • DECISION: All agreed that people can attend all or some of the workshop
  • DECISION: Only one registration link
    • Eve will have people tell her if they have travel plans to let her know if there would be slots
    • Eve finished website
  • DECISION: We can send out announcement this week
  • What about listserves for REC people?
    • Director of Jenicca’s REC is interested in sharing it among all RECs
    • When Eve gets registration link from Flora (tomorrow), Eve will send it along to Jennica

REC workshop: Curriculum

  • Eve put together tentative schedule
    • Schedule split into an hour and a half sessions
    • Cut out intro to R
    • Manipulating and analyzing data in R
      • Introduction to ordinations
      • Intro to linear mixed models
      • NEON section
      • Data clustering
      • SQL for Data Management
  • Jenicca confirmed that advanced material is desired
    • People at the REC already been to one intro to R workshop but didn’t specify curriculum that they wanted
    • Could we find advanced courses under the Carpentries?
    • The material that Eve included was suggested as supplementary material by the carpentries
    • Stats out of traditional Carpentries scope
    • Could present challenges
      • There are a lot of subtle things about each topic
      • Within that time frame, can’t cover the subtlety
      • Should we do Software Carpentry in Shell or Git instead?
      • How much is hiding lots of complexity is beneficial in the long run?
      • Will the students give up and want to know how to run the models without understanding it?
      • Either simpler, or fewer topics
      • This is more about teaching tools, rather than stats
      • NEON day 1, and day 2 version control, then geospatial
      • what about the shell?
      • if we did geospatial, would it just be one day
      • forget shell and git, keep Day 1
      • NEON at day 2: first hour and a half
      • then geospatial after that?
      • Do we want to make it just a geospatial workshop?
      • Or add git at the end?
  • What does Jenicca think the RECs would want?
    • she sent out survey
    • most people voted for Ecology, close second was geospatial
    • is the version control useful for the RECs?
    • Jenicca thinks maybe not really useful for RECs, most people know it
    • R for ecologists, NEON data, and geospatial are probably of most interest
  • Consensus, change schedule to be: Day 1: R for Ecology: manipulating and analyzing data, visualizing data Day 2: am, lesson 1: Intro to NEON Day 2: am, lesson 2: extension of NEON lesson or R markdown (https://ourcodingclub.github.io/tutorials/rmarkdown/) Day 3: Intro to raster Day 4: Intro to shapefiles

  • Once registration link gets finalized, will send out, then will have second call for moderators and instructors
  • Brian will be able to help on the second half, now with the multi-day schedule

Sending out report to funders

  • Planning to send all funders a final report
  • Usually send UFII a report
  • Alethea will send out updated budget numbers
  • Survey: Eve asked Flora to send us previous workshop information
  • worksheets need to be copied from excel sheet, then run the old code
  • Need to send report to Carpentries (has template)
  • Do we have a deadline for this?
  • There wasn’t a particular deadline
  • What is needed exactly? Jenicca is meeting with Geraldine to walk through these files
  • Jenicca and Brian work on this next week, or if Jenicca wants to do it, she can lead it

Next meeting agenda items

  • We need to subscribe to our annual membership sometime soon
  • The Carpentries is putting together the carpentries connect virtually
    • Eve will be volunteering
    • https://carpentries.org/blog/2020/06/call-for-carpentrycon-review-and-regional-hosts/
  • Do we want to do workshop in August? What will our August/fall look like?
    • Image processing, python
      • new on the carpentries page, in beta, about 8 hour lesson
      • 3 or 4 day workshop and do 3 hours a day in August
      • keep this in consideration, possibly with USDA machine learning
  • Do we need to bring in someone else on board, since we don’t know what Minghao’s involvement will be? We’re close to an election, can manage between the remaining

Next meeting

  • Due to workshop schedule, postpone next meeting until July 14th
  • Brian: chair, Elise: secretary

Updated: