This paper documents and describes roles and responsibilities for the codeRtsv organizing committee. This is a living paper and it should be modified and updated often to reflect codeRtsv structure, vision, mission and members goals.
The most important role and responsibility of the codeRtsv organizing committee is to ensure adherence to our group policies and promote programming/scripting literacy in a diverse and welcoming environment at James Cook University (JCU).
Below is a list of assets and tools that are often used to run codeRtsv. The organizing committee helps to plan and maintain activities associated to codeRtsv short to long term initiatives, these are all important and include: community coordination, website maintenance and development, fundraising, organizing sessions, among others.
The following assets and tools are maintained by members of the organizing committee. Currently, several online services codeRtsv uses are associated to members personal accounts. This is impractical giving the likely high turnover of members over time. Thus, ideally in the long term these should be migrated and associated to a codeRtsv email, and when possible JCU staff should be included as co-owners because JCU staff is likely to remain at JCU for longer periods than students.
We maintain a Google calendar which is linked to codeRtsv and JCU HackyHour slack apps. Thus, any event added to the calendar is automatically posted in those slack workspaces.
Current access to Google calendar: César, Wytamma and Chlöe (maybe other members).
Host/Owner: unknown
A codeRtsv spreadsheet is maintained in Google documents (under a member's account?). This spreadsheet contains a sheet for each of the following: sessions' log, list of member and their emails, list of future topics, pictures of kittens, list of emails used in mailchimp, meeting stats, and list of projects. The sessions' log, and members' emails are probably the two most important assets stored in this tool.
Current access to Google documents: Natalia, Wytamma, Legana, Kevin, Peter, César, Ira, Jia, and Chlöe
Host/Owner: unknown
The YouTube channel contains the videos from several of our sessions.
Current access: Wytamma
Host/Owner: unknown
One of codeRtsv biggest assets is our GitHub account. Several repositories associated to past sessions, current projects, codeRtsv papers, and our webiste are maintained in GitHub. All codertsv github members have write access to all repos.
Current access: Alfonso, Bruna, César, Kevin, Jelliman17 (?), Lauren640 (?), Lorenzo, RhysGillman(?), Stewart, Chlöe, Ira, Wytamma, and Peter.
Host/Owner: Chlöe, Ira, Wytamma, and Peter.
codeRtsv website (and source) is hosted in GitHub, and it uses Ruby's Jekyll framework.
Current maintainer: Lorenzo and Wytamma.
Host/Owner: Chlöe, Ira, Wytamma, and Peter.
Our Slack account hosts our vibrant community and is the place where most of our interactions happens. We currently have 139 members.
Current maintainer: unknown
Host/Owner: Pete
We have an email lists within the JCU sub-domain, and we use mailchimp to create and distribute our emails.
Current maintainer: Jia and Natalia (?)
Host/Owner: unknown
We used our Twitter account to advertise and promote our sessions and events, and to celebrate the wins and achievement of our members. We currently have 106 followers.
Current access: César, Chlöe, and ?
Current maintainer: César
Host/Owner: Chlöe
This section list the activities, roles and responsibilities that members of the organizing committee are encourage to undertake. We have classified organizing committee functions in two categories: long term and short-to-medium term.
Long term planning and maintenance activities are those that require consensual thinking of codeRtsv members, including setting goals and plans to achieve them. Activities listed in this section help us to achieve long term goals such as those described in our group policies, or other long term objectives (e.g. maintain or increase the number of members).
Roles and responsibilities associated to community coordination.
- Curate Slack channel
- Slack channel is mostly a self-running environment, but every now and then it would require attention
- Survey members interest and needs
- Recruit new members and speakers
- Create and maintin partnerships
Roles and responsibilities associated to website maintenance and development.
- Update dependencies
- Develop new features, and improve old ones
Recruit new members for the group and organizing committee is an important task to ensure codeRtsv long lasting success. We use the following strategies for recruitment:
- Periodic emails through Graduate Research Schools and JCU Colleges, Centres and Units to postgraduate research students.
- Word of mouth
- Soft spoken recruitment of new organizing committee members
We maintain strategic alliances and partnerships with other groups and organizations with similar aims. We seek to create synergy through these alliances and partnerships. The current partnerships are listed below. The organizing committee is encouraged to nurture these, and create new ones.
- tRopicR: JCU Cairns R users
- HackyHour: JCU eResearch and QCIF
Sessions and events are normally scheduled weeks ahead of due date. Finding speakers and instructors can be difficult due to time conflicts and availability. Thus, a general advice is to book down a speaker or instructor during the planning and scheduling stage.
- Identify session and event topics
- Find instructor and speaker with expertise and time
- Schedule event
In addition to our weekly sessions, codeRtsv is seeking to create additional events to target intermediate and advance members, for instance:
- Hackathons
- Intermediate courses/sessions
codeRtsv logotype is our main marketing brand. We created coffee/tea mugs and hex-stickers using our logotype. Other initiatives are welcome.
We obtained funds from the Centre for Tropical Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology. These funds were used to create marketing products for our members. Members of the codeRtsv committee are encouraged to scout other funding sources.
Short to medium term planning and maintenance activities are these that required weekly or monthly attention. These can be divided and assigned to specific roles, or these can be run holistically.
Currently codeRtsv organize weekly training sessions on research computing. Our sessions can be classified as hands-on or lecture learning. We often utilize and adapt lessons from online modules (i.e. carpentries) but we also create our own novel lessons and workshops. We organize training lessons in bimonthly non-consecutive sessions, and we use the other two available sessions each month to give space to our community to present or show other ideas or tools.
Creating didactic and friendly spaces for people to learn and promote programming literacy is at the heart of our group. One of our strategies to achieve this is our weekly physical or virtual sessions led by our members or guests. This section lists some of the activities and responsibilities that will ensure planning, advertising and running sessions smoothly.
- Schedule speaker/facilitator: invite and add speaker/facilitator to a calendar event for the session Time: weeks ahead of session
- Confirm speaker/facilitator availability Time: one week before session
- Consult speaker's preference on recording and sharing their session (No, Yes, privately, publicly) Time: one week before session
- Confirm the session space and/or virtual room Time: one week before session
- Add event title and description to codeRtsv calendar (currently hosted with Google) Time: one week before session
- Prepare advertising text - for convenience we currently write 280 character invitation Time: one week before session
- Share session advertisement on Twitter Time: 3-4 days before session
- Share session advertisement and location on Slack Time: 3-4 days before session
- Send session advertisement through email list Time: 1-2 days before session
- Share session advertisement on Twitter Time: 1-3 hours previous session
- Introduce speaker/facilitator at the beginning of the session
- Start recording (if speaker/facilitator has agreed)
- Monitor and moderate questions in the room or chat
- Keep speaker/facilitator on time
- Record number of attendees
- Run the lucky attendee codeRtsv-mug raffle
- Note, curate and share any resources used during the session
- Fill sessions' log sheet in Google documents
- Obtain, (edit?) and publish recording in codeRtsv YouTube channel
- Update codeRtsv website: speaker, session title and description, resources used, extract
- Conduct a session debrief (if required: positives, aspects to improve, new opportunities)
People in the organizing committee is not required to be a coder. We welcome your enthusiasm and organizational skills. We will appreciate your help and input in coordinating and leading our group.