Present: Heather Turner (HT), Emily Dodwell (ED), Kevin O'Brien (KO)
Absent: Tania Allard (TA), Jenny Bryan (JB), Di Cook (DC), Jasmine Dumas (JD), Jonathan Godfrey (JG), Isabella Gollini (IG), Julie Josse (JJ), Tanja Kecojevic (TK), Michael Lawrence (ML), Augustina Ragwitz (AR), David Smith (DS)
Present: Angela Li (AL), Joyce Robbins (JR)
Absent: Stella Bollmann (SB), Carolin Strobl (CS), Rudolf Debelak (RD), Andrea Foulkes (AF), John Fox (JF), Gina Griffin (GG), Madlene Hamilton (MH), Liz Kellogg (LK), Joslynn Lee (JL), David Meza (DM), Gina Merchant (GM), Ileena Mitra (IM), Wenfeng Qin (WQ), Maëlle Salmon (MS), Tracy Shen (TS), Noa Tamir (NT), Charlotte Wickham (CW), Hadley Wickham (HW), Yizhe Xu (YX)
- KO: Interesting read
- Discussing R in Africa on #community:
- KO: Committee formation to develop African analogue of RLadies (essentially a RUG with significant R Ladies Global involvement) with interest in geographic spread
- KO: Company structure may be required for conference organization capacity
- KO: Good governance structure via an auditor (external, power to dissolve committee if necessary), which is a vestage of RUGs network
- HT: Due to restrictive LGBT rights in African countries, in the short term it's better to have R summits by region organized by local entities vs. a global event (e.g. useR! organised in Africa) because citizens can't help the laws of where they live, but we do have the choice for a global event.
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- Forwards mention.
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- AL: It would be valuable to collect (anonymized) information via pre/post-workshop surveys sent out to Forwards attendees as a way of assessing impact/reporting outcomes, especially in light of being able to report on outcomes for the R Consortium grant.
- HT: It does need a bit of pre-planning to get permission to use people's email for a follow up survey. If you plan to do this for your Chicago workshop, please note Forwards privacy policy. We could create a new private repo for teaching team surveys.
- HT: I've added a private repo named teaching_surveys and given the teaching team write access (core team members have admin access).
- AL: Here’s the Software Carpentry repo with a list of questions they use for learner assessment — perhaps we could design a shorter version for Forwards?
- ED: AT&T is hosting a Youth Technology day in late March/early April, and I'm in discussions with the organizer to run a co-current session for ~15 high school students based on the workshop JR and I ran. I believe there will be a mix of girls and boys, but materials would be credited to Forwards and as the instructor, I'll be a representative.
- HT: As the materials are CC-BY anyone can use them with credit, but for outreach to underrepresented groups, I'm happy for such things to be called a joint event with Forwards or to use the Forwards logo/name in promotion etc.
- AL: I was thinking about planning another USA-based women’s package workshop on the East Coast with Sam Toet in the summer, in Charlottesville, VA.
- The idea would be to do a second Forwards workshop for individuals located on the East Coast/Mid-Atlantic — I’ll have experience running a workshop, and can help Sam with infrastructure, and she has lots of experience teaching workshops with R-Ladies Charlottesville. Then maybe she can co-teach a Forwards workshop with some other R-Lady!
- Publicizing next workshop in Chicago and discussing follow-up questionnaire on #teaching
ACTIONS
- Add Youth Technology Day to Edu page as record of Forwards-related workshop/training (ED)
- Next slackathon will be in March. Vote for your preferred weekend via the survey in Slack.