RFC1: Organization and responsibilities of The Carpentries

[k8hertweck]

View RFC1 here

Q1: Do you agree with above described responsibilities of The Carpentries organisation? Specifically:

Q1a: are there any responsibilities missing?

Q1b: is there anything The Carpentries organisation should not be responsible for?

Q2. Other comments?

[JasonJWilliamsNY]

Re:Q2 - This overall looks very well done, kudos! Searching for something to pick at, it's very clear that the Carpentries is an organization with all the bells and whistles. What I am less clear is how much the term "organization" applies to the Lesson organizations. I am guessing they are lower on the autonomy scale without any independent fiscal identity or staff. Is that true? If it is, should the term organization be reconsidered?

Independence, autonomy, and redundancy are surely issues you have considered. Are there more details on this? My feeling looking at #7 is that lesson organizations are really "departments" (if committee is too polarizing a word).

[tracykteal]

It is confusing that both are called 'organizations'. Some re-naming is definitely in order. The main thing is that you're right about the autonomy scale, and the framing as a department is good. Lesson groups/departments/organizations will likely have a committee that oversees them and can also have staff working specifically on that project, but the focus will be on the topic and lesson content and structure and helping people to teach those lessons, rather than overall governance, operations or infrastructure.

[pitviper6]

Well done, this is succinct but covers all the bases.

Agreed, there needs to be a more clearly named separation between the Organization that is The Carpentries and the lesson orgs. I don't think that's going to be much of a problem, since Git/Github enforces a fairly clear community around each lesson, with maintainers and contributors and their own issues space. It just a name thing, not a process thing.

[npch]

This looks good. Like @JasonJWilliamsNY I'm picking at the details.

Q1a:

• Quality. There's probably a line to be drawn about what aspects of quality "The Carpentries" are responsible for versus the Lesson Carpentries. Lesson quality is the obvious one already captured, but others could be metadata quality (for description of events, materials), communications / branding quality (partially covered in lesson consistency, but probably going beyond just lessons) and reporting quality (The Carpentries provide templates and guidance for what needs to be reported by lesson carpentries, and review this).
• Reporting / Metrics. I think that there's an overall responsibility on "The Carpentries" to report on behalf of everyone under the umbrella outwards to stakeholders and within the community. This doesn't mean that Lesson Orgs might not report as well, just that the reporting responsibility for "The Carpentries" extends beyond financial reporting.

Q1b:

• Delineation of responsibility. I think that it's good you've given specific examples of what parts of the things such as Workshop organization and Community development and communication are the responsibility of "The Carpentries". It would be good to give the specific examples in RFC7 as well which cover the "other side".

Q2:

• Assets: should it be made explicit who will hold assets such as trademarks, domain names etc?

[gvwilson]

I think this is well thought out - my only suggestion is that I think a name like "Research Carpentry" will be much more comprehensible to outsiders than "The Carpentries", but I acknowledge that ship has probably sailed. Thank you for putting this together.

[tracykteal]

@gvwilson there's still naming conversations! https://github.com/carpentries/2017Merger/issues/10

[gvwilson]

Thanks - comment added there.

[kcranston]

@JasonJWilliamsNY and @npch : picking at details is very much appreciated, and this is absolutely the right point in the process for it. Thank you for your comments and suggestions. As @pitviper6 has noted, the separation between the umbrella organization and the lesson organizations is one of the trickier parts of this process, and where the merger committee really needs feedback to supplement the discussions we have had so far.