The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program

This repository contains context, resources and curriculum for all modules developed under The Carpentries Facilitators Program.

TL;DR

Summarily, the Community Facilitators Program is a new initiative in The Carpentries that seeks to create new pathways for active involvement in everyday community activities by more community members. This program will help sustain the growing Carpentries community and support other core programs that contribute to the advancement of our mission.

Long-Form Context

In 2019, Kari Jordan, Tracy Teal, Sher! Hurt and Serah Rono constituted a Core Team working group that discussed how to support Carpentries community members through conflict. This working group identified the need to develop a task force that would come up with recommendations for dealing with incidents that come up in our community spaces and whose review and resolution fall outside the mandate of The Carpentries Code of Conduct (CoC) committee (see task force charter). One of the key recommendations from this Task Force was the institution of a Code of Conduct Facilitators Program to serve as an added layer of support for our community before incidents are reported to the Code of Conduct Committee (CoCc). Details about how the Code of Conduct Facilitators Program were first proposed by Malvika Sharan, the 2020 Code of Conduct chair, in Q1 2019. In summary, while maintaining the role of the CoCc as a CoC enforcement body, Code of Conduct Facilitators would actively monitor Carpentries online spaces and physical meetings and share potentially negative behaviours or otherwise certify that the community is functioning as expected.

In thinking about what the term facilitation as a verb in our community, we also realised there existed more opportunities for community facilitation, by our existing community and for our growing community, across the board. With this in mind, we decided to expand on the original mandate of Code of Conduct Facilitators in The Carpentries to include other necessary elements of facilitation that we see as necessary for the health and continuance of an established community like The Carpentries. This, we believe, will help community members see themselves as Facilitators in different ways that are fulfilling, and open up multiple pathways for interested community members to build trust and work with community members in these different facilitation roles

In Summary, Community Facilitators would be people who would be empowered to advocate for others in the community and guide community members as they navigate various intricacies of The Carpentries global community.

Community Facilitation in The Carpentries

From early 2020, The Carpentries Core Team, with input from experts like the CSCCE team, have been hard at work developing resources and onbording community members to empower them to spearhead different kinds of facilitation in The Carpentries. Here are the different facilitation roles we see an immediate need for in The Carpentries:

1. Code of Conduct facilitation

   Bridge between community members at events and our Code of Conduct processes

2. Technology facilitation

   Community-facing and community-led helpdesk for all everyday ‘how-do-I’ questions that newcomers have as they collaborate with others on platforms The Carpentries uses i.e. GitHub

3. Community buddy system

   Providing a safe and welcoming environment for the onboarding of new community members - saying hello and ‘come to me with any questions’, etc

4. Communications facilitation

   • Community-led committee to help translate key communications so we can share these in languages other than English across our socials
   • Scouting for good candidates across our community to speak in panel-style, monthly Carpentries conversations

5. Resource enhancement facilitation

   Content design facilitation to guide the publication and archival of community-created resources in a way that makes them accessible to all, and lowers barriers to knowledge acquisition by other community members i.e. replacing sea of text with images, GIFs, videos, illustrating workflows to make them easier to understand, managing tags and their use to collate resources across Carpentries platforms, etc

6. Accessibility facilitation

   Reviewing Carpentries accessibility guidelines that guide interactions in online and in-person spaces, as well as the creation of written and audio-visual content and choice of platforms. Ideally, these guidelines will be authored by Core Team and passed along to community facilitators for expansion, enforcement and maintenance i.e. update guidelines as nature of interactions or platforms evolve.

7. Feedback facilitation

   • Review anonymised community feedback collected by The Carpentries to periodically offer official recommendations and kickstart conversations on issues and items that Core Team should prioritise.
   • Maintain a public, community-wishlist board that collates community feedback on different initiatives and experiences in The Carpentries
   • Recommend topics for Carpentries Conversations to the Communications facilitation team

Community Facilitators Program Timeline

Here is a timeline of activities as The Carpentries Core Team works to develop resources for the Community Facilitators program. If you are interested in collaborating with us on a specific module that may also be of interest for your community, please reach out to Serah Rono via email.

Role	Personnel	Timeline
Program Lead	Serah Rono	start - end of program
Curriculum authors: Pilot module Code of Conduct Module All other modules	CSCCE, Serah Rono, Kari Jordan CoCc, Serah Rono Community Development Team	Q3 2020 Q1 2021 Q2 2021 - Q4 2021
Trainers / Mentors: Pilot module Code of Conduct Module All other modules	CSCCE, Serah Rono, Kari Jordan CoCc, Serah Rono Community Development Team	October 2020 May 2021 Q3 2021 - Q2 2022
Outreach	Carpentries Communications Manager, Serah Rono	start - end of program
Resource reviewers Pilot module Code of Conduct Module All other modules	Core Team Core Team, Executive Council Core Team, facilitators from previous cohorts	Mid and end of Q3 2020 Mid and end of Q1 2021 Periodically between Q2 and Q4 2021

Community Facilitators Program Life Cycle

Community Facilitators Program Clavis

• Cohort - Carpentries community members trained at the same time and who then work together to develop relevant community-facing resources that address specific glue-work needs
• Community Facilitators - community members trained using the Community Facilitators Program curriculum
• Program Curriculum - suite of resources developed by this Task Force to train Community Facilitators
• Curriculum module - set of resources in the curriculum addressing one topic i.e. Code of Conduct facilitation
• Post-Training Framework - A resource created by the Task Force to guide Community Facilitators in identifying needs in The Carpentries community that they can collaboratively work to alleviate in their cohort after their training