Director of Community, The Carpentries
Tallinn, Estonia
Came for the code, stayed for the community: Lessons in building and sustaining technical communities
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Serah Njambi Rono is a computer scientist and a writer. She has served as a technologist and Developer Advocate in the Open Data, Open Source, Open Science space for more than 6 years now, and has broad and valuable experience in listening to and shepherding communities, developing and implementing strategies for various technical projects, as well as for community building, outreach and the sustainability of existing, mature communities. Serah is currently the Director of Community Development and Engagement at carpentries.org.
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Came for the code, stayed for the community: Lessons in building and sustaining technical communities
Description
The Carpentries brings scientists, technologists, librarians, and researchers from around the world together for the exchange of programming and data science skills. All resources developed under The Carpentries umbrella are open source, and developed by community members, for community members. Python lessons tailored for different domains are some of our core offerings - see Data Analysis and Visualization in Python for Ecologists, Image Processing with Python, Python for Atmosphere and Ocean Scientists among others.
In this talk, I will share how The Carpentries employs its collaboration-driven ethos and applies it in various aspects that have contributed to the growth of the community to a 65,000+ member-strong initiative that primarily interacts and collaborates online. In this talk, I will cover our collaborative approach to code-of-conduct creation, community values definition, core resources co-creation, annual voting for community leaders, resources for effective online collaboration that we use, etc. I will also speak about challenges we have faced over the years, those we have overcome and how, and those that remain untacked, or are a work in progress. By the end of this talk, I hope to inspire other communities in the audience, and spark good conversations about strategies for building and sustaining Python communities.