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Organizing a Workshop
This material was created before the advent of the Carpentries Handbook. Do check the below procedures against the section on Teaching and Hosting to see if there are updates.
- planning
- room logistics
- catering
- registration
- organize instructors
- setup workshop site, contact the Carpentries
- add event to UF-Carpentries website
- waitlist and priority enrollment
- general announcement
- participants list
- write down any curriculum-specific notes from the workshop
- pre- and post- surveys
- update participant data
- send participant data to Carpentries
- workshop certificates
Please come to the UF carpentry board meeting to discuss the curriculum of the workshop you wish to run (data carpentry/software carpentry, what lessons?). It would be best to budget at least 6-8 weeks of planning prior to a workshop to have enough time for advertising, call for instructors, and room scheduling. This is particularly important for instructor training, which should be earlier in the semester so that more potential students have free time before exams.
Alethea & Flora maintain a calendar for the UFII class room (24 people). There is an official room request form, but contacting Alethea and Flora directly by email is best. You can send them a list of flexible dates, or ask for viewing access to the google calendar (though note they will also be able to let you know about which bookings are immovable, and which ones they may be able to ask the reservation-holder about relinquishing). The UFII classroom is used a lot now so it is best to book 4 weeks or better yet, a whole semester ahead.
Other options include Marston Science Library L136 (28 people) but this is a tiled display wall and not very good for presentations, and Marston L308 (22 people) which has a clustered table style setup. Contact Dan Maxwell to schedule these rooms or you can try these links for L136:
http://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/collaboration/L136
https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eeT62ZFo4IqUf2J
Reitz Union (free for departments)
For some workshops, such as the instructor training workshops, it might be good to book breakout rooms.
Alethea and Flora do all the catering now. They will also look at the registration to see the vegetarian/vegan splits and order appropriately. Be sure to contact the helpers and instructors about dietary restrictions, since they won't go through the normal registration process.
Alethea & Flora work with the UF Conference Department to set up the registration page and it takes them 2 weeks to do it so it’s good to get it started early.
They will need to know what to title the event ("Data Carpentry", "Software Carpentry", etc.), what to cap registration at (see room sizes above), and how much to charge. Currently we are charging $46. $30 is our break even price on catering and the conference site charges a few dollars in credit card fees so $46 is the most we can charge and stay under $50 total.
They will give you a link to the registration form that is fully active so do not share unless you are ready for people to begin registration. Let Flora and Alethea know what date the registration should become public so they can include it in their announcements.
The [email protected] is the best place to look for instructors. The Carpentries also maintains an instructor list, but there are usually many local folks who are interested just on the informatics-teaching mailing list.
We like to aim for 3-5 people in the room at any single time during the workshop. That translates to 2 helpers + the instructor at a minimum for each section of the workshop. There is usually a lot of demand to teach workshops, so it can be common to have 4 instructors (1 for each half-day). The same can occur with helpers, so be sure to coordinate timing and material appropriateness.
Be sure to coordinate a meeting of the instructors to review any questions about the curriculum and what they are planning to cover or not cover.
Setting up a workshop page has its own page of instructions.
The workshop web site is what provides the information to the Carpentries for tracking and documenting workshops so it should be set up before notifying them of the workshop to minimize emails. When it's up, use the request a workshop form for Software or Data Carpentry. In the notes, make sure it's clear that this is a self-organized workshop and we have instructors and include a link to the workshop web site. Ask for links to the pre- and post-survey results to be mailed to you.
Someone from the Carpentries will email you the survey result links. That's how you'll know that your workshop will be listed in the surveys' drop downs. The survey results are confidential so do not share the links outside the Carpentries organizations.
All board members should have write access to the website repo. Within the main folder, there is an _events folder that contains markdown files describing each event. The website doesn't actually use the content section of the files, so it suffices to copy over the header from a previous event and make modifications.
Be sure to edit the information in the fields for "title", "start" and "end" times, "location", "website", and "topics". Once a new markdown file has been committed to the repo, the website will build automatically, and you should see the workshop appear on the events page, as well as in the sidebar under "Next Event", if it is the forthcoming event. (If it doesn't show up there, you may need to correct the date and time info in the event's markdown file.)
As decided by the Board on March 26, 2019, we are following this procedure for reserved seats for our fiscal sponsors (note that this updates the policy from January 8, 2019):
- Set up workshop registration, and set the registration cap at 1/2 capacity.
- Distribute registration link to sponsors 1 week ahead of time.
- After 1 week, set the registration cap at full capacity and send out general registration announcements.
- The board will maintain a list of people who inquire about the next workshop. (Also ask Alethea and Flora if anyone has contacted them).
- Send out an email (BCC'd) the day before general announcement of the workshop.
- A sample email:
Hello!
You're receiving this email because you were waitlisted for a previous Software or Data Carpentry workshop and we wanted to give you the first opportunity to register for our next one . We'll be sending out the public invitation tomorrow () morning. You can find more details on the workshop web site:
And the registration page is here:
We hope you can make it!
Flora has been sending out ads to the UFII email list. Ask to proof her copy though since the Software vs Data Carpentry distinction isn’t clear to her and sometimes the details about what will be taught is wrong/different from last time.
Be clear in the announcements that participants should bring their own computers, have admin access, and have installed the appropriate software before showing up on the first morning. (since some folks may click through to registration without checking out the workshop website)
We're currently piloting a survey to reach out to people who won't be able to attend the workshop, in which we ask whether they would be able to attend if:
- The workshop was on a different day of the week
- The workshop was at a different time of the semester
- The workshop cost 10$ less
- The workshop cost 20$ less
- (Any other reason)
We've listed other advertising venues on our Google Drive -- please do update this list if you find new things!
Aletha and Flora can send two kinds of reports about the registered attendees. Ask for the one that includes emails. I've then been manually copying and pasting information from the report into a Registrants Google doc in the workshop's Google drive folder. Include the following columns, using Google searches to complete affiliation and department if needed:
First_Name
Last_Name
Email
Affiliation (Student, Undergraduate, Graduate, Staff, Outside, Post-Doc, Faculty)
Department
Attended_1
Attended_2
Take attendance and ask people to sign up at the workshop and update the attended columns to mark off who comes. Only people who attend both days can get certificates and should be put in the Carpentry database (see below).
This registrants list gets merged with the master list and forms the basis for out stats page so please keep it accurate.
2 days or the prior Thursday I send out something like this BCC’ed to all the registrants:
I hope everyone is excited for the Software Carpentry workshop on at the UF Informatics Institute next week! We will be starting at 9:00 am on Monday but there will be some breakfast items available if you want to come a bit early. Also, if you need help getting any of the software installed that is listed on the workshop page[1], we will be available to help starting at 8:00.
Before you come to the workshop, please take a few minutes to fill out our pre-workshop survey. This information is used by us and by the Carpentry organization to help us improve and it is vital to our being able to demonstrate our value to the institutions who support us:
<workshop pre survey link>
If you have any questions between now and the workshop, please feel free to email us. Thank you and we'll see you there!
<workshop web site>
- setup - There is a cardboard box labeled "Data Carpentry" that is in a steel cabinet in one of the back offices at UFII. This has some stationary for us to use (nametags, post-its, index cards, markers). We can also use stationary from the room next door. (Be sure to let Flora know if you use the last of something - bring her the box so that she can order more.)
- At the end, remind students of the UF Carpentries Club and our online communication venues (https://twitter.com/UFCarpentries/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/322971701740318/).
We have a wiki page for curriculum-specific notes; please add any specific lessons you learned from your workshop to the appropriate section of that document, or create a repository to store your notes and link to it from that document. Please also add a link to your etherpad.
The morning after the workshop I send something like this BCC'ed to everyone who came:
Thank you for coming to Software Carpentry this week. We hope that you enjoyed the workshop and learned a lot about shell, R, git, and SQL.
If you have not done so already, please complete the post-workshop survey. This survey is shared with the Carpentries organization and helps both them and us improve our workshops and demonstrate our value:
<post workshop survey>
The etherpad contains links to the workshop website and lessons, in addition to other resources and groups at UF. We encourage you to spend time on your own reviewing the lessons to cement what you learned, and continue to learn and practice your informatics skills.
<etherpad>
The UF Carpenties club is always looking for people who are interested in making these workshops happen: helpers, instructors, and supporters. Please consider joining our listserve linked at the bottom of the etherpad to keep up with our activities and opportunities to participate.
Thank you again and we hope you enjoy continuing to learn.
The list of participants and instructors needs to be updated. These are currently spreadsheets in the top-level Google shared folder. You may need to look up participants' departmental affiliations to ensure as complete a record as possible.
To update the workshop stats, export a csv of the participants list, and replace the existing file in the website-stats hidden repo (under analysis/data). This will trigger the scripts to update the figures automatically.
Update the data in the sponsor info (2018-2019 sponsors) with the names of attendees who used priority registration slots.
** (2019-03-11) The Carpentries is currently updating their systems and don't want this information at this time.**
The Carpentries need to keep a list of participants for their records. Emailing them a CSV of the participants Google doc is sufficient. Either to [email protected] or to SherAaron Hurt [email protected] directly.
As of 2019-02-13, the Carpentries is working on a new system for certificates. For now. send a list of names and associated emails to Francois Michonneau to produce certificates.