jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #4 on 31 Jan 2020 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Other, Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events
If you build it, they will come…but then what? Facilitating communities of practice in R, Kate Hertweck
A lot of research computing teams I’ve seen have started regular training sessions for researchers; sometimes on a specific area, sometimes as ”Tech Talks” with varying topics. The model is generally one of having the technical team teach the researchers things, which is good and valuable but a little limiting and not really sustainable - you have to keep coming up with topics, teaching them, and hoping they stick. What would ideally happen is that the technical team would facilitate a self-sustaining community of researchers interested in computing teaching themselves, with input from the technical team still happening but not being the only form of instruction.
At Fred Hutch, “The Coop” has had good success with this, and Kate Hertweck, as bioinformatics training manager, has been one of the leaders of this effort. The slides give an overview of their work, and you can see how it looks in practice at the Coop’s website.
