Who are we (aka Pat's manifesto)

[pschloss]

I have a big vision for group that coalesces around three ideas.

First, my motivation is to provide opportunities for trainees to develop real instructional experience beyond holding office hours and grading. I have to imagine that a job candidate that comes in saying, "I've developed and taught my own courses and have designed evaluation tools and incorporated feedback into my teaching" would be in such a better position than the typical candidate. We are starting with Software Carpentry and eventually Data Carpentry because I have been impressed with the content and openness of their materials and their overall model. I really like how they foster the career development of their instructors. At this point there are several faculty/staff who are SWC certified instructors and several students who are also certified. I'd be very happy to never teach a workshop because the students/postdocs take it over and do everything. Of course, I really want to teach the material, but given the choice, I think we should give the opportunities to the trainees (without burning them out and distracting them, of course).

Second and related to the first, is that I hope this group is very horizontal in its structure. I think that's another plus about SWC/DC. Anyone can file an issue, submit a pull request, and we can have a discussion. So if you think of something you'd like to do, a tweak that we might try to put our own block M on things, or a critique, I really hope you'll speak up. Again, this gets back to the first point. If the faculty are in this group to be a liaison to the administration and people with money, and the trainees run everything, that would be great.

Third, I hope we can evolve into being SWC/DCplus. I can see us building off of their model to provide additional workshops to provide niche services. For example, someone might want an HTML/CSS workshop. Or they might want a data visualization workshop. Etc. If someone is willing to step up and create the content I think we should do it. I can also see us offering more informal opportunities for people. Noam Ross has a UC-Davis R Users' Group that is very successful (there's also an A2 R User's group) where they hold weekly office hours or get together to work on projects. I think it would be awesome if we could evolve into supporting something like this. For example, I think the A2DataDive is something we should be involved with in some form.

Anyway, I've said too much, but wanted to get people's feedback and to perhaps see how my vision aligns with yours. Please feel free to comment below. I would ask you to think about how we want to brand ourselves. Do we just want to be UM-SWC or something broader? Suggestions on names? Once we have a name we can make a website, stickers, swag, etc. :)