Introduction

Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 10 min

Questions

• What is the Community Facilitators Program in The Carpentries?

Objectives

• Learn more about The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program

• Understand how to get involved with The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program

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). More specific suggestions about how the Code of Conduct Facilitators Program could operate were first proposed by Malvika Sharan, the 2020 Code of Conduct committee 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 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 are people who are 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

In early 2020, The Carpentries Community Development Team kicked off work to(i) develop resources and (ii) prepare to onboard and empower community members to spearhead different kinds of facilitation in The Carpentries. We believe there is great value in co-creating resources to guide community members in carrying out various facilitation roles, as there is need for them in The Carpentries and other organisations that share our core values and where synergies exist in our mission and initiatives. In Q2 2020, we collaborated with Lou Woodley fromCSCCE to co-create the Feedback Facilitators Module (more below). 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. Feedback facilitation

• collect and organise community feedback shared publicly and informally in Carpentries spaces for ease of discovery, followup and response in the community,
• 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 and Themed Discussions to the Instructor Development and Communications facilitation team as appropriate

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

Community Facilitators Program Timeline

The seven modules we have identified as a starting point mean there is a lot for us to do.

Below is the projected timeline of activities as The Carpentries Core Team works to develop resources for the Community Facilitators program.

Invitation to Collaborate

If you are interested in collaborating with us to co-create a specific community facilitation module that may also be of interest for your community, please reach out to the Community Development Team via email.

Community Facilitators Program Life Cycle

Key Points

• Community Facilitators are people who are empowered to advocate for others in the community and guide community members as they navigate various intricacies of The Carpentries global community

• Look out for calls for application to be a feedback facilitator on The Carpentries blog between Q4 2020 and Q4 2021

• Interested in collaborating with us to co-create some of the seven modules in the Community Facilitators program? Let The Carpentries Community Development Team know