Hi all, There have been pockets of discussion within The Carpentries community around this subject in the last year or so, and these four events stand out as our 'why' for putting out a request for community input to jumpstart more formal conversations around this subject at this time:
* While writing a communications strategy for The Carpentries in Q1 2019, we heard from community members that certain tools and platforms that The Carpentries uses are inaccessible to community members in certain countries and regions around the world. * In December 2019, as our community chatted about The Carpentries teaching of Git and use of GitHub (see blog post <https://carpentries.org/blog/2020/05/conversations-teaching-git-github/>), this issue was also raised in discussions. * In June 2020, while preparing for 2020.carpentrycon.org, CarpentryCon Task Force checked in with some community members to determine what alternative platforms could be used during sessions in order to make the virtual conference a more inclusive experience. * In August 2020, Steve van Tuyl posed a question in The Carpentries' Slack <https://swc-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/> '*about where to find out what countries restrict access to what software applications/web applications*' and with an aim to use this to guide the organising of a virtual hack week with international communities participating We would like to hear from you: *what tools and platforms used by The Carpentries are inaccessible or unavailable to people in certain countries or regions around the world?* Please share as much detail as you can in response to this email or under issue 26 in The Carpentries Conversations repository <https://github.com/carpentries/conversations/issues/26>, with links where possible, and remember to mention affected countries / regions in your response. We hope to gather input over the next few weeks, as we work to organise for community discussions to deliberate, and determine a way forward. Thank you all for your time. -- Best, Serah Njambi Rono Director of Community Development and Engagement at The Carpentries <https://carpentries.org/> Twitter: @serahrono <https://twitter.com/serahrono> Pronouns: She/her/hers Schedule a meeting with me: https://calendly.com/serahrono The Carpentries <https://carpentries.org/> *- **We teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.* carpentries.org | Twitter <http://twitter.com/thecarpentries> | Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/carpentries/> | Blog <https://carpentries.org/blog/> The Carpentries is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives <http://communityin.org/>, a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organisation based in California, USA. We are a global community teaching foundational computational and data science skills to researchers in academia, industry and government. ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Tc78a657d4ad07e63-M5679bc9c41b97571cdeb3500 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
