Software Carpentry at the University of Oslo in 2015 and 2016

Software Carpentry at the University of Oslo in 2015 and 2016 #

Software Carpentry is a volunteer organization whose goal is to make scientists more productive, and their work more reliable, by teaching them basic computing skills. Founded in 1998, it runs short, intensive workshops that cover program design, version control, testing, and task automation.

In 2015, the (then) only two certified Software Carpentry instructors, Karin Lagesen and Lex Nederbragt, started a collaboration with the Science Library (Realfagsbilbioteket), with the goal to offer more workshops and recruit more instructors.

This document is a summary of our activities in 2015 and our thoughts of continuing the effort in 2016.

Activities in 2015 #

  • We have offered three workshops to UiO and OUS staff, in February, June and December
  • 101 PhDs, Postdocs, master students and other staff registered for these workshops
  • We taught in total 70 participants
  • Registrants came from Geosciences, Biosciences (IBV), Medical Genetics, Oslo University Hospital, Astrophysics, Pharmacy, Mathematics, the Natural History Museum, Chemistry, the Science Library (Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences) and the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (Faculty of Humanities)
  • We went from two certified, volunteer instructors to four
  • And additional five people took the Software Carpentry instructor training and are close to becoming certified
  • Three more persons have helped at workshops and shown interest to become instructors
  • we started using email lists

Workshops were organised with the following program:

  • day 1, morning, task automation with unix
  • day 1, afternoon, version control with git and github
  • day 2, introduction to python and modular program design

The interest for these workshops demonstrates that there is a clear need for the type of training Software Carpentry offers. Many researchers will need to analyse, or write tools to analyse, larger and larger datasets, but lack the formal training to do this effectively. Software Carpentry addresses this gap as a grassroots organisation, taught by researchers for researchers.

The help of the Science Library has been very important, they book rooms, arrange registration (both sign-up before the workshop, and at the beginning of the workshops) and generally make it very easy for the instructors to fully focus on the teaching itself.

Outlook for 2016 #

Given the interest in 2015, we foresee a significant growth and expansion of the Software Carpentry effort in 2016.

In 2016, we expect to:

  • Offer at least 6 workshops
  • Add modules on the R programming language
  • Participate in the planned ‘Carpentry week’ around the Science Library birthday celebrations in March, with multiple workshops, round table-discussions etc.; we have already a confirmation from Data Carpentry that their Executive Director will visit Oslo to participate that week
  • Start offering Intermediate level workshops with more advanced version control, scientific python etc (for this we need to train instructors or invite experienced volunteer instructors and refund them their travel and lodging)
  • Start offering Data Carpentry workshops. Data Carpentry’s mission (http://www.datacarpentry.org) is to provide researchers high-quality, domain-specific training covering the full lifecycle of data-driven research with a focus on computational skills needed for data management and analysis in all domains of research
  • At least double the number of certified instructors and the number of helpers
  • Have at least four certified Data Carpentry instructors

One of our goals is to convince the University of Oslo to become an Software Carpentry Foundation Affiliate. Such a status is a prerequisite for having prioritised access to instructor training (for which there is overwhelming interest). Affiliate status has relatively few requirements/costs for UiO, while there are several benefits. Details can be found at http://software-carpentry.org/scf/membership.html.

Some references #

Software Carpentry’s FAQ
Software Carpentry paper: “Lessons Learned” 2015 edition
More about Data Carpentry
Software Carpentry at UiO webpage at the Science Library

Written by Lex Nederbragt with the help of many of the Carpentry@UiO organisers.