Thanks to the efforts of the whole Carpentries Community, we received a number of great suggestions/bids for CarpentryCon2020’s theme and venue. Many thanks to those who took time to suggest a theme or submit a venue bid.
Read more about the theme and venue below and bookmark the CarpentryCon2020 website for additional updates.
CarpentryCon 2020: Meet Up in Madison, Wisconsin, USA!
We are excited to announce that CarpentryCon2020 will be held on June 29 - July 1st, 2020 at the University of Wisconsin - Madison (Madison, Wisconsin, United States).
Photo by Jeff Miller/UW-Madison
The city of Madison is sandwiched between two freshwater lakes, features an iconic state capitol building in the city center, and is a short trip from several other large US cities (Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis). The University of Wisconsin - Madison sits along the shores of Lake Mendota, including a student union with a lakeside terrace. CarpentryCon2020 will be supported by a growing local community of instructors, coordinated through UW-Madison’s Data Science Hub.
We cannot wait to see you there!
Growing Inclusive, Computational Communities and Leaders
As a team, we pulled together your many wonderful theme suggestions into the final CarpentryCon2020 theme, “Growing inclusive, computational communities and leaders”.
We chose this theme because it represented many of the core ideas/philosophies of the Carpentries, including: computational skills, inclusivity, community building, and continuous skill building.
Join us at CarpentryCon2020 so we can learn from each other and grow our community further.
CarpentryCon 2021: Let’s Go to South Africa!
We emphatically thank the many individuals who put together venue bids.
There were so many amazing choices for venues that started a discussion among CarpentryCon Task Force and The Carpentries Team about what it would take to run a successful CarpentryCon in these suggested places. We all agree that developing relationships with potential institutional partners locally in the different regions is a key aspect. We appreciate that this might take more time in some cases, and are convinced that starting the planning process early is a good idea.
Thus, we are also excited to announce that next CarpentryCon will be in 2021 (that’s right, no year break this time!) in South Africa!
Stay tuned for updates about CarpentryCon2021!
Our Decision-Making Process
As most of the venues submitted met all of our initial requirements, we focused on five additional criteria and weighted (ordered below by weight) them based on voting by the task force members:
- Fiscal policy
- Visa requirements and the complexity/cost of the process to the hosts and participants
- Travel/accommodation cost (to participants)
- Regional rotation - Having a different geographical region each time for CarpentryCon
- Potential to engage local community (based on its size) - strategic goal & bigger picture for The Carpentries
- Venue cost - hosting cost
We then used these weighted criteria to narrow down the venues to Madison, Wisconsin, USA and South Africa. Since we were excited about both venues, we decided to move on Madison for 2020 and start planning for South Africa in 2021.
If your venue was not chosen, we encourage you to resubmit your venue for consideration for a future CarpentryCon or organise a CarpentryConnect there! The CarpentryCon Task Force hopes that by planning for CarpentryCon 2021 alongside CarpentryCon 2020, we can make this process more reproducible and bring together The Carpentries community more regularly.
What’s Next?
The CarpentryCon 2020 Task Force continues to work on the other aspects of planning for the conference including registration and keynote speakers. Periodic updates may be found on the CarpentryCon2020 website and here on The Carpentries blog.
We hope to see you in Madison.
~ Bianca, Daniel and Sarah, on behalf of CarpentryCon Task Force.