Hi all, I realise I'm very late to the party here but I've been following the discussion and I wanted to add one option which I don't think has been explored yet.
First off, an opinion. I don't think SWC should provide volunteer workshops to organisations that are not demonstrably involved in open research. Such an approach is common in organisations such as PRACE and XSEDE who distribute supercomputing cycles on publicly funded resources to promising research. That being said, I do not have a problem with someone like Monsanto sending some of their science team to attend instructor training, especially since they are required to volunteer at a workshop to actually get their badge. The material they need to instruct in-house is freely available to them because of SWCs open licencing without SWC having to lend their name to that effort. My opinion is that this approach is also much more likely to generate meaningful engagement if they do see value in SWC since you will have someone inside the organisation to champion your cause. Kind regards, Alan On 9 Mar 2015 17:58, "Ivan Gonzalez" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: El 08/03/2015, a las 12:03, John Blischak <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> escribió: > Certainly a highly trained SWC instructor, who typically has at least > a bachelor's degree plus some advanced training, leading a workshop to > teach employees of a company to use computational tools would not pass > this test. > > http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm > http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/13/are-unpaid-internships-illegal/ > > What are the policies of other countries? Have they passed similar > legislation? We have a similar lawn Spain. The law prevents Monsanto from hiring an instructor for free or peanuts, as the benefit of the teaching goes mostly to Monsanto, and not to the instructor. It even applies to graduate work: the Supreme Court has ruled that if you're doing a PhD, which in principle would be ok to be unpaid because you're getting a degree, you must have an employment contract under Labour Law after the first two years. That is because it's understood that from the third year the benefits the university gets form your work as a student overcome those you get from your PhD studies. However, it's completely legal that Monsanto "hires" SWC to teach the workshop and that you volunteer for the non-profit SWC. Nobody gets paid, beyond reimbursements or fees, and the teaching fits under the reasons for which SWC is a non-profit. If you get paid though, it may get tricky, and not for Monsanto. You could claim that you *work* for SWC (because you are getting paid, not just reimbursed), so you are a SWC employee working without an employment contract, not paying social security taxes, etc… It may be different in the US, but in my opinion having paid instructors by default would be a huge administrative burden, specially if we want to expand to other countries with an international pool of instructors under many different immigration status. In my opinion, the simplest solution, leaving aside the ethical part, would be charge a flat fee as we do know and then, after the workshop, have someone call these wealthy companies and schools asking for an extra donation. This scales better than changing the default and allows to really pick the wealthy ones without misguided preconceptions. Best, Ivan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH 52425 Juelich Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498 Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDir Dr. Karl Eugen Huthmacher Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Marquardt (Vorsitzender), Karsten Beneke (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt, Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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