 All right. Can everyone see? Excellent. So I'm really excited to be joining you today. I'm going to be talking about, well, I come to you as the Director of Instructor Training for the Carpentries. So everything I have to say comes through that lens as well as through my experience with a local community here in Davis and sort of efforts to reach out and find out how the local thing is done. So I'll be sharing some of my perspectives with you on communities, communities of practice at the local level and at the global level and the ways that these functions, sort of the mechanics that I've observed, my views on these and how these cultivate software and data skills and research. You may have heard of the Carpentries, but if you have not, we are a nonprofit, fiscally-sponsored project, although I think, as Rosie said, the company is not the thing. We are also our community. We support training in entry-level software and data skills for researchers. We actually have ways in which we address training at other levels. I'll talk with you a little bit about how that sort of happens. But our workshops and our programs focus on entry-level skills and we build community and local capacity for teaching and continued learning of related skills and perspectives. We are a global organization. Our community is spread around the world. We have a very heavy representation in the United States and in Europe, but we also have burgeoning communities in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and smatterings of communities starting up all over the world that we are very proud of. I won't go over our lesson programs in detail, but in brief, we are composed of three lesson program software Carpentry, Data Carpentry and Library Carpentry. These are unified around, again, that novice-level training effort. A generally two-day workshop format, these can be broken up in different kinds of ways, but that's about the size of the package that we talk about in any given workshop. Volunteer instructors, applying Carpentry's teaching practices. We train them. We train our instructors to apply the teaching practices that we endorse and we focus on addressing gaps in computational skills. So why community-based training? Why not just sell workshops or focus on getting more courses in the university setting? Technical skills are scarce. They are often disinflient-specific and fast-changing. This makes traditional courses very difficult to develop, difficult to maintain, and particularly difficult to deliver to the people who need them at the time that they need them. Most researchers self-train. This is the context that we're working in on the specific skills that they need when they need them. That self-training benefits from timely launch support and a community of practice to guide their progress. So Carpentry's communities exist at several levels of organization. You can break these down in other ways too, but I'll broadly be speaking to you about two of these levels. We have global communities, regional communities and local communities. Our global communities as a general rule support development of instructional skills and materials. We talk about teaching. We talk about how to teach workshops. We talk about how it's gone. We talk about how to teach people to teach workshops. We talk about curriculum development. Our local communities are where the technical workshops are at. So they're hosting our technical workshops. They're supporting development of technical skills. And our regional communities primarily serve to connect those local communities together. I won't be speaking to that so much today. So a little bit about the functionality of this global community thing. We have various different ways that people participate in our global community. One is simply as a participant. People come to our community events. They come to our community discussions or our conference. And they're there for that. We also have various roles that people can play in our community. Many of these sort of come down to instructional support. So that includes instructor trainers, instructor development committee and curriculum maintainers has now has a community and we are going to very soon be having a community around curriculum development. That's in the works at the moment. And then we also have people who serve in policy and governance roles. We have our code of conduct committee or executive council. Lots of different ways that people can can participate at the global level. The this global community is composed primarily of instructors. That's not exactly by design. But the instructors that we that we onboard are are the people we keep the most track of we don't keep track of people who attend our technical workshops at the at the global level. But technically, our opportunities for engagement, skill building, advancement and leadership are open to anyone. So you don't have to be an instructor to engage with our global community. We have an emphasis on inclusion and welcoming newcomers. So we're excited to see people no matter who they are. But the reality is that our instructor training and our checkout process that invites people to participate in our global community in a very various different ways. This is this is our primary form of onboarding right now. We demonstrate our community principles there and the mechanisms of interaction with that global community. We do have a new role however, that we hope will will facilitate not only the onboarding of instructors to joining our global community because that's not always a straightforward process even after instructor training, but also to provide more opportunities for anyone who wants to engage. This new role is called community facilitator the goal the goal is to facilitate feedback within and across our sub communities. This is meant to be an entry level role that's accessible for newcomers. And the the goal for its functionality is to improve information flow within our organization and again between and across our communities. This attention to feedback in particular, we hope will enhance the effective voice of all of our community members giving people a chance to have what they say really make a difference to how our organization functions. So why do people do this? We are an organization that is composed primarily of volunteers who are have really busy lives. I don't totally know the answer to that question, but I have spent a fair amount of time talking to people. Occasionally we have folks that write blog posts about why they think it's so great to do what they do. So a few things that I've observed in this process. Our global community participants report that they are actually learning technical skills. And you see this at the instructor level as well. You're working in a community where a lot of people have technical skills, and you're working on projects that often require technical skills, you might learn GitHub skills, or you might find yourself talking about your work and encounter somebody who knows an answer. So this is a context in which people are actually continuing, we don't offer advanced training, but the participation kind of is our advanced level of training in a number of ways. A little bit in our global community, and I think even more for our instructors. They're learning teaching skills. Again, our global community is very focused in talking about instructional practices. They're learning community skills, leadership, meeting practices, conflict resolution, generally people skills. And then they value the connections that they're making. It's exciting to meet people from around the world. I'm excited to be talking to you in Australia from California today. It's fun. And the accomplishments, they're making a difference. They're doing something that matters to them. They're supporting research, and they're supporting people. So that's the summary of our of our global community. But many of you are most directly involved in local communities and most interested in local communities. Our local communities again are much more focused at that level of technical instruction. This is where those technical workshops happen. And because not everybody has a mental model of the various different roles we have, I gave you a little figure here. We have in our local communities, and in a technical Carpentries workshop, you would have a bunch of people who are taking the workshop, we call them learners, because they may come to us at any level, they're not all necessarily students at the University or wherever you may be. Those workshops are facilitated by helpers who are who play an important role in the community. They're taught by instructors. And those instructors at some point have been trained by an instructor trainer. So local communities tend to include instructors, helpers, learners, hosts who who help to make a workshop happen who aren't necessarily always instructors. And sometimes trainers, if the trainer, if the if the local site has a trainer who may serve in a mentorship role, features that I've observed in our most successful and robust local communities include that they provide support between workshops. So they offer workshops at a certain interval and it might not be that often, but then they have a mechanism, maybe office hours, hacky hours, other kinds of things. And in between, there's a social component to what they do. There's situations in which you can get together in some form or another and not necessarily always talk about work and get to know each other. There's a pathway for learners to become helpers, for helpers to become instructors. And something I don't see in all communities, but I have definitely noticed is there is a need for instructors are learning from their experience and their care. And especially when you're talking about folks whose job who who if not necessarily their job to be teaching Carpentries workshops, there is going to come a point at which they've gotten the most that they can out of the experience and maybe it's time for them to do something else and thinking about what that's going to be and being prepared for those folks to move along and take on other kinds of roles in your community is really valuable. These communities have community leadership. Carpentries communities don't do all that well in a top down sort of way. They function best when they do some governing themselves and deciding how they're going to function. But it is important that they have institutional support. And maybe that's comes down to a bank account and a room or maybe that that takes on a more elaborate form. But it is a particularly helpful feature for folks who are trying to build local communities. A little bit more on that governance and voice thing. All communities need leadership and participation, but I've noticed that in some cases you can kind of get a community going on on leadership. But leadership without participation is a great way to burn out your leaders, right? You need that community participation as well. So what do participants need? They need to be known, invited and recognized. That can take an awful lot of work. Sending out individual emails, for example, instead of mass emails when you're trying to get people to come to a thing. If people think that you might miss them and if they don't show up, they're a lot more likely to show up to a thing. So in personal outreach makes a big difference as you're trying to get things going. Participants need effective voice and community decisions. They need to know that if they come, what they say matters to how things are going to happen. And importantly, they need a way to get involved that seems achievable and not too much. They need small and graded responsibilities to help them if they don't maybe feel like they can come in and be an instructor right away, or even necessarily aren't sure that they're a helper, but they're okay bringing the coffee. There's a lot of different ways that you can offer opportunities for people who kind of want to engage because they want to be part of this community, but aren't really sure about the commitment yet. Leaders also have needs. Again, those are the folks who really benefit the most from that institutional support to let them do what they want to do. And again, like instructors, there needs to be an expectation and a path in and out of leadership roles. You need to expect some turnover and support that turnover in the leadership of your group. So that's sort of group participation, but I also want to take a minute to talk about why people teach. We have this whole entire organization focus that benefits from volunteer labor. And a lot of people sort of scratch their heads over why do people volunteer to teach these workshops. Again, in my view, really the role of instructor for an awful lot of people in our community is it is a training opportunity. It is our advanced skills development opportunity. People are learning technical skills. Even if they know everything in the workshop, you're still going to learn things when you're listening to other people teach it. You're going to learn things about how they teach. And again, this kind of side conversations that can come up either as you're preparing a workshop or talking about how to teach a workshop turn out to be really valuable for people. They're learning institutions support this. Why would a supervisor support this? Karen, it was just a little bit laggy. OK, we're OK. Sorry about that. The winds are intense here. So if I disappear, that might be why. But so far, we seem to be OK. So benefits to supervisors and institutions. We need that institutional support. This particularly the leaders and participants of a group need to know that their supervisors are OK, not only OK with them, but like it that they're participating in these ways. Why should anybody want to lose their people to all these kinds of activity? Carpentries communities are good for institutions. They create scarce training opportunities. They improve technical and teaching skills for those researchers who are doing the teaching as well as everybody else. And these kinds of inclusive communities support healthy workplaces. When people have something that they belong to that's rewarding for them, that makes them more effective at work. One thing that I think is really important to share and we try to share in all of our context in the Carpentries. When we teach people to teach technical workshops, we often say the errors are the pedagogy. When you set out to teach a technical workshop, you've got to expect that you might make a mistake. And if you do that's an opportunity to show your learners how to make a mistake because they're going to make mistakes and they're going to get errors and they need to be able to cope with it and you get to show them how they're going to cope with it. We also talk about making mistakes when teaching and it's important in building communities to expect that you're going to make mistakes there as well. At the Carpentries we learn through deliberate practice. We learn from our mistakes and we apply a growth mindset to progress. It's also important to recognize that mistakes or no, communities can naturally ebb and flow. And that's something that you may just kind of have to observe and do your best to work with. But the only way to really fail in these contexts is failure to persist as long as you're paying attention and learning from your mistakes. So looking ahead, the research community always faces challenges. Some of them are more new than others. Researchers always transition through different roles. They come and go in the ways that we want, we need them to be. Funding change is unpredictably. Support professionals responsibilities fluctuate as well. So if you have someone who's dedicated to teaching in their job, they might not have that time. And sometimes as things change in their work environment. And then sometimes pandemics happen and we all have to reinvent everything that we do and nobody has any idea what's going on anymore. These things affect communities. They make it more difficult to build communities. But robust communities also have resilience to these kinds of challenges. Funding might cut programs. But that skill sharing can still continue if you have a connected community of people who are interested in this sort of work. Community roles that benefit participants can continue to attract new people, even as people who have served in those roles move on. And particularly at times like these, when things get hard, the inclusion, the support, the belonging of these kinds of communities matter even more to everyone. So thank you for your interest in what we do. And I'm really glad that I got to be here with you today and I'd love to take your question.