Forging Data Skills: A collaboration to offer The Carpentries to multiple institutions

Background: The Carpentries is a community-led organization teaching foundational coding and data science skills. It includes lessons for Data Carpentry for learning data literacy, Software Carpentry for learning programming languages, and Library Carpentry, which is focused on teaching information professionals these skills while empowering them to advocate for reproducible data practices. Libraries are at the forefront of offering Carpentries workshops. Typically, organizations purchase a membership or number of workshops organized through The Carpentries. Hosting workshops is a major undertaking requiring institutional staff time and resources. As a collaborative network of multiple health sciences organizations, we coordinated efforts to offer frequently occurring workshops across a large user base and geographical area, while tailoring offerings to specific audiences.

Description: A collaborative, cross-institutional taskforce created a plan to facilitate and fund a series of Carpentries-hosted workshops. The taskforce assessed and discussed staff capacity and anticipated interest based on experience from hosting Carpentries workshops in the past to determine how many workshops to host and how to distribute workshops. One central office was designated to handle the coordination and communication with The Carpentries, including negotiating a discount for purchasing multiple workshops and liaising between Carpentries staff and local contacts at each partner organization to work out scheduling of workshops. We will discuss how we collaborated to develop this coordination plan, tips for successful implementation of workshops, and how we plan to evaluate this initiative in terms of redistributing staff effort and time and meeting the demand for Carpentries activities across a diverse and complex network of learners.

Conclusion: The team will measure the success of implementation techniques, including the frequency of offering, variation in time zones, similarities in format and differences in lessons across offerings. Success will be measured as engagement through registration and completion of workshops, post-workshop satisfaction survey data, and long-term follow-up evaluation of data skills attainment and use.