David Yakobovitch
You are listening to the HumAIn Podcast. HumAIn is your first look at the startups and industry titans that are leading and disrupting artificial intelligence, data science, future of work and developer education. I am your host, David Yakobovitch, and you are listening to HumAIn. If you like this episode, remember to subscribe and leave a review. Now onto the show.
David Yakobovitch
Today I am speaking with Dr. Kari Jordan¹, the executive director of The Carpentries. This organization is near and dear to my heart. In fact, it is one of the first ways that I joined moving from the data and big tech world into the open source industry, and, we’ll talk about in the show today, how I came to The Carpentries² and all the great work they’re doing and what Kari is doing in the evolution of open-source learning. Dr. Kari Jordan, thanks for being with us today.
Kari Jordan
David, thank you for having me. Wow! it’s been a long road getting to this podcast.
David Yakobovitch
It’s a long road, but the road continues and we have seen in 2020 that open source and communities are growing and more important, especially as we’re in this digital first world. I’d love our listeners to hear about what your journey has been to open source and that The Carpentries.
Kari Jordan
Sometimes I’m almost embarrassed to say this: But I hadn’t heard of open source until I started working with The Carpentries and more specifically data carpentry. I come from an engineering background by trade, I’m a mechanical engineer, I went to school for mechanical engineering and I planned to work in manufacturing and somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the nonprofit space, switched my topic during my PhD studies from mechanical engineering to engineering education and worked through getting a PhD, doing a post doctorate.
And a couple of years ago, I saw a job posting for deputy director of assessment for data carpentry, loved everything about the organization and it wasn’t until I joined as a team member with data carpentry that I heard the term open source, so needless to say, I did a lot of googling. When I first started with data carpentry, I had no idea what open source was.
David Yakobovitch
I know for me, my journey into The Carpentries started, I think it was about five years ago. I was still living in Florida at the time before I moved to New York and I was on this very new platform called Twitch. And at the time, five years ago, I don’t think Twitch was huge yet, but there was this PhD person, developer, fellow teacher, who I’ve worked with in The Carpentry’s, who was live-streaming coding in Python. And I was visiting New York for the weekend and I said, ‘Hey, are you, are you in the city’? Because he was live streaming from a Starbucks in Manhattan.
And he was like: ‘Sure!’ And we met and we got a coffee and we talked about code and, long story short, he’s a contributor to open source and to some of these big tech startups, and that got me into open source and we think about everything with #TheCarpentries, whether its data carpentry focused on data literacy skills or software carpentry and foundational computer science skills, or even library carpentry focused on digital literacy around consuming content and high-quality media.
Traditionally, all of this has been in person and we’ve potentially flipped the classroom this year. How has been adjusting to remote, been for your team and for all the universities that you partner with?
Kari Jordan
The funny thing is, in terms of my team and shout out to my core team. We call ourselves “The core team,” those whose full time kind of role is working for The Carpentries. We are a remote team. There are about 12 of us working for The Carpentries, I live in Florida, we have team members in California, in Estonia, in France, in South Africa and in Canada, we’re all over the place and we work remotely full-time, so the shift that we’ve seen over the past couple of months from a teamwork perspective has not changed, but in the way we deliver our workshops has totally changed.
And of course, a lot of our team members have extra co-workers, whether it be a small child or an animal or something like that, they work from home because of the pandemic, but we’ve had to move our workshops online and, it’s been a challenge because part of The Carpentrie’s pedagogy truly is the act of learning the feedback, the in-person two day positive learning environment, diverse, inclusive learning environment, again, in person.
How on earth do we translate that experience to a #virtualformat? And if we do, will learners leave having that same level of excitement, learning the same thing that they would have learned in a two day in person workshop?
So those are sort of things that we’ve focused on. We’ve moving our workshops online, making sure that the quality in our brand stays the same, but I have to tell you; the core team, we can’t do it by ourselves. The entire community has rallied with us, in order to move our workshops online and we’ve gotten so much feedback from instructors all over for what’s working, what is not working, and how to make workshops more accessible, it’s just been phenomenal! I had no idea that we would be doing this when we started this year. That is sure.
David Yakobovitch
In learning, the modality keeps changing, but the curriculum and the outcomes are still the same, high-impact transformational learning and my involvement with The Carpentries, I’ve seen firsthand the opportunity for working with places like Afirma Lab or Harvard Medical School or NYU Langone, and it is incredible to see how anyone can code, anyone can learn technology and now’s a better time than ever to get into tech.
Kari Jordan
I didn’t know if you were going to mention this too David, but I’ve seen such growth even in your involvement. I’ve been with The Carpentries a few years now and you have been a pillar for our #mentoringprogram. And I was trying hard not to give you a shout out, but I have to, because you really were one of our key mentors and moving in terms of confidence in helping those newbies, so to speak, get involved with The Carpentries.
So, I just want to give you your roses while I’m here and say thank you so much because if it were not for mentors such as yourself, continuing to leverage your own expertise and your own passion, really for data and coding and sharing that with the community, we would not have a strong community, like we do now. We wouldn’t be able to teach as many instructors or we wouldn’t even attract people to coding and data if we didn’t have mentors like you who are championing our calls. So, thank you so much.
David Yakobovitch
Thanks for those warm fuzzies. And as you put it, The Carpentries has always been community first. It’s always been about diversity, it’s always been about scale: Impact and outcomes, and today a lot more of that’s possible than ever before. I know recently that you’ve received some fantastic grants to partner with some leading organizations. What is some of that new opportunity possible for The Carpentries?
Kari Jordan
It’s so great! So, we received quite a substantial amount of support from both the Moore Foundation and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and this funding will help us scale our instructor training program. What we’ve learned is that our instructor training team, from a core team perspective, is about three people, but we serve a very large instructor pool, and so, we needed to have space in order to improve the workflows for our #instructortrainingprogram so that we can train more people to teach workshops and so that we can train people to teach workshops in the language and they’re in the language they want to teach in and the areas that they want to teach in. And so, the funding that we receive will help us build and scale our instructor training program, our maintainer program as well.
We have about 33 collaboratively developed lessons right now, and those lessons need help, not only to maintain the content, but we get a lot of questions, and comments, and feedback on our lessons, and so, we need maintainers in order to keep those lessons going and keep them relevant, and also our curriculum development.
I can’t tell you how many times a week I get an email, from a potential partner or a potential instructor that says, ‘Hey, I want to have a lesson, a Carpentries style lesson in genomics, or astrophysics, or engineering education, or botany’. And so, it’s up to us to build the infrastructure for community members to build lessons, using our curriculum development handbook and things like that. So, we’re trying our best to build infrastructure such that community members can support the work that they want to do and that’s not so much rely on the core team.
David Yakobovitch
And from thinking of the core team to the maintainers, everything at the carpentry’s is open source. So if your student today is listening to the podcast who wants to pick up something in astrophysics or genomics around coding you can go to The Carpentries or you can experience all that and it’s incredible to see how as a community we weren’t really thinking a decade ago about open source being the change agent for education.
But fast forward into the 2020s that’s where we’re, and part of that is to create these equitable and accessible outcomes, which we’ve thought about from a perspective of like well money does a degree cost $ 200,000 to learn Python, or there could be a different conversation, perhaps learning is more affordable? Can we see in universities, like in Europe, that education is free and perhaps The Carpentries is beginning to fill some of that need, to show that you can learn high quality, top quality open source.
Kari Jordan
It’s definitely at the top of my list and something that I think about so much, even open source is a part of a deeper conversation around data science I remember I was in a working group and there were representatives from the industry academia, the nonprofit sector government, and we were having a conversation about the skills needed in order, the skills that students need in a data science curriculum and when I tell you everyone had something different to say about what skills are actually needed in order to, for someone to call themselves a data science, everyone had a different narrative.
What’s important in industry may not be extremely important in academia, or it just depends and so the same thing for open source what’s important in open source for industry may be totally different than what’s needed in nonprofits, so how can we truly say what education would look like and what would a show look like, or what a degree would look like and how much that will cost if there’s so many different pathways?
I had no idea what open source was, but now I can advocate for it and we can offer opportunities for workshops you may not get that in a university, but what does that mean for a degree program? or how does how can I justify paying or having someone pay for a four-year degree to learn open source or learn to reproduce or all of these things when they can come to a The Carpentries shop, it’s just one it’s a very interesting conversation about the curriculum and who owns it and how it’s shared. It’s very interesting, but I definitely shift.
David Yakobovitch
This shift is so interesting because we’ve seen it in the software industry for many years, that the movement was to open source and the #dataindustry has been a lagging indicator, typically around 10 years behind but we’re seeing that, that catch up right now where knowledge, the training, the shift is moving, where anyone today can go, GitHuband Fork or Repoand pick up a topic and be coding in minutes, which is incredible to see that shift. And what do you think is sparking the growth in open source or the growth or interest in The Carpentries?
Kari Jordan
It has to do with problem solving and it comes from the desire to want to solve problems in your own community or want to solve problems that you see things that have been problems for such a very long time that they have not been solved for me this is why I talk so much about not only diversity, but inclusion.
It’s not enough to invite diverse people into the room you have to give them ways to engage and to have their voices heard and so contributing to open-source projects, more people are realizing, hey! I don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist or work for 30 years in a lab in order to solve a problem or to contribute one of The Carpentrie’s core values is to value all contributions.
And we honestly want to say may be a brand new person to code or to, to data, or science, or librarianship, but you have a knowledge that I do not have you have an experience that I do not have and so if we put together all our bits and pieces of knowledge and experiences, think of the kinds of problems that we could solve. So that’s really what it’s all about for me: Just bringing people together of all backgrounds and giving them the space to contribute what they have, because every contribution truly does matter.
David Yakobovitch
And those contributions, we see the shift in both big tech and small tech that when you talk today to champions at big tech like the Google, the Facebook of the world you can talk to leaders who say four year degree maybe not as important and I recently had a conversation with one of these leaders and they said: Okay, here are four interesting things we think about that could be a good indicator that you’re a good fit in tech.
And so one of them was, maybe you compete maybe you do The Kaggle, The LeetCode, The TopCode, The Olympiads, so you’re a math buff second maybe you’re a Dr. Kari Jordan, maybe you’re a PhD as the perks third maybe you’re someone who builds projects in code and you like to share them with the world, whether you sell them or open source them or fourth where you are a contributor or maintainer to an open source project.
Kari Jordan
Absolutely because we need each and every one of those roles it also has a lot to do with personality types. Yes, I am the executive director of this organization, I tend to be a little outgoing, I don’t mind putting myself in front and things like that but there’s also someone who would be terrified to be on this podcast to speak in public but put them up front cook them in front of a computer or open up our studio or open up Jupyter Notebook and they can go for it they know what they’re doing and they love teaching and they know what their zone of genius is, and that’s why I’m very happy that the contact that you were talking about had outlined those four different wave pathways. It really is about pathways everyone’s journey to open stores is going to look different.
I was in a mentoring session there was a young lady who reached out to me via LinkedIn, actually because she wants to get involved in open source and she wanted to know how to do it and I hope we didn’t end the conversation, me confusing her because there really is so many different ones I could not tell her, you need to sign up for GitHub and learn, no there’s so many different pathways so I had to ask her, I had to go even deeper, why do you want to learn open source? What kinds of problems are you trying to solve? What is important for you? Because there are many ways you can go about being involved.
David Yakobovitch
And you said it’s such a fundamental word, carry that I’ve heard a lot of conversations this year that have flipped the classroom and said it’s not a pipeline problem usually in tech we´ll think: it is! it’s the number, like we need to there’s not enough talent it’s a pipeline problem, it is not a pipeline problem, it is a pathway problem.
Kari Jordan
David, it’s a pathway problem because what is a pipeline? There’s one way in, there’s one way out there may be some a leaky pipe, there may be some, some places in the pipe that have a leak where people kind of slide out of the pipeline but a pipeline if I’m imagining this is always an interesting analogy for me because I did work in oil I worked for Marathon Petroleum Company.
So when I imagined pipelines, there’s one way in and there’s one way out how does that leave room for someone who comes from an underserved community or a community that’s historically underrepresented, what if they don’t have the same access as someone from a more affluent situation? Does that mean they can never be part of an open-source community or contribute to an #opensource project, so it’s all about pathways? There is no wrong way to get involved there are many ways we can get involved with open source.
David Yakobovitch
We’ve been having a lot of these conversations that have been very life-changing I think for a lot of team members at Galvanize in the last few months, as I’m sure you’ve experienced not only firsthand but through all of your friends and family that the pathways that should be there just are not there.
And these are the heartbreaking conversations that we’ve been having in big tech, Galvanize we’re all about pathways I mean we have a $1 million scholarship fund, our CEO is a Brown person of color our CEO of K-12 and our board is predominantly black, so we have that diversity that we’re like living and breathing for the organization, but we’re not the only company and The Carpentry’s is not the only company we’re, we’re only part of the solution
Kari Jordan
That’s one of the reasons why it’s so important for us even again this is me giving you your flowers. Thank you for allowing me to speak on this podcast because you have such a huge platform that there may be potential partners out there who align with The Carpentries mission that I maybe never heard of.
I’m learning about new organizations every single day, every day, I’m learning about a new, not necessarily new, but an organization that I had not heard of before who’s working in open source who’s advocating for open source. I heard of Open site or The Academic Data Science Alliance. I mean, I can just go on and on and I’m like, there are so many people. And this is again those are just two that I named that are possibly US-based just think internationally.
There are hundreds of organizations dedicated to allocating resources, to providing opportunities for people to get involved with data and coding and it’s not the responsibility of one organization to do all the work, The Carpentries I feel like our zone of genius really is that training teaching data skills training that type of pedagogy what about, we have great resources for teaching lessons but what about diverse datasets?
That’s not an area that The Carpentries is, an expert in, that’s not really our zone of genius, but maybe there’s another organization that focuses more so on the kinds of #datasets that you would teach in a workshop there’s so many ways so many organizations that we could collaborate with in order to achieve our mission and so it’s really important for this opportunity for access and just sharing what we do is so important.
David Yakobovitch
And it’s about having diverse data sets because if there’s anything we’ve seen at least lately in the news a lot of the #data sets around credit related crimes around COVID are not diverse and that has been creating a lot of challenges and a lot of headaches, whether it’s with finance, whether it’s with jobs and I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, and part of it is making sure that outcomes from the beginning are set up for success with diversity and inclusion and I’d love to dig deeper. I know you’ve done a lot in that training and assessment space and you take a lot of pride with assessments, I mean how do we meet learners? Whether at with these assessments.
Kari Jordan
I really think that you have to come into the situation knowing that you may not have all of the answers and all of the knowledge, I also think it is important to identify what do we want to get from the assessment of a program? So I’ll give you an example: when I first started with data carpentry, I was responsible for kind of doing an overhaul of our assessment program. We have plenty of surveys.
We had collected tons of data about our workshops and whether or not they’re working, and we fought initially let’s measure whether or not someone can actually write a script let’s measure whether or not someone can actually solve a problem using code and what we learned in going through that exercise and kind of piloting those more skills based assessment surveys, especially in different communities was that they had a negative effect on the participants, participants were coming especially novices, they were coming into the workshops excited about taking the workshop, excited about what they were learning and then when they took the pre-survey it felt more like a test to them and their confidence dropped because they felt, Oh my goodness! I’m supposed to know this already?
So we had to take a step back and say do we want individuals to leave our workshops knowing how to write a perfect script? Or do we want them to have confidence in searching for the answers? Do we want them to have an increase in their self-efficacy? Do we want them to be able to join a community and continue their learning? So when I look at assessment of any kind of program I’ve really asked myself, what are the intended outcomes of the program?
What do you want for your participants to walk away with that’s extremely important to the carbon truth we don’t want anyone leaving our workshop feeling worse than when they came in or feeling that I’m never going to learn this I’m never going to get this it’s more so about that self confidence piece that belonging to a community that’s what it’s all about, and eventually you’re going to learn some code, you’re going to learn how to code.
David Yakobovitch
And learning how the #code and being part of a community is what I hear a lot about asking the questions I mean, we´re not all going to be able to recite hundreds of lines of code from our minds and with where some tech startups going soon, we’ll be able to auto complete a lot of the codes so that’s where we come in to help strategize and make sure everything makes common sense, and I think that ability to search is underrated isn’t that what PhD is? Anyway you’re reading through so much research.
Kari Jordan
Everything is searching for the answers, trying to fill in the holes.
David Yakobovitch
And that’s part of the conversation we’re seeing with open source, and we’re seeing with like unbounded education or uncommon schools that you don’t need to necessarily have that master’s degree and you can be just as successful, you potentially have just as much grit, as much resilience as much persistence and discipline as that other individual, and perhaps now this new digital world we’re going to see more of that shift.
Kari Jordan
The shift is here David I was thinking about so I’ll give you an example: I have a 16 year old niece and she’s visiting for a month and we were talking about she’s going into the 11th grade and she’s thinking about what she wants to pursue, I don’t ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, because I feel like I don’t even know what I want to be, but what does she wants to pursue? and she gave me at least five different answers. I want to be an influencer for this, and I want to run a website that does this, and I want to do and I want to create video games. Now that’s my 16 year old niece.
My father by contrast, he worked at Ford Motor Company for 47 years, and that was it, so again, pathways, it’s all about pathways there’s no wrong way, and I very much appreciate the fact that industry is acknowledging a four year degree may not be the answer for everything there are things that I’ve definitely learned in college.
I’m very happy that I went to college, it taught me how to be organized there’s lots of things that I learned being at a four year university, but industry is noticing that you can pick up skills along the way you can take a two day course, you can take, a month long seminar and be just as effective in your role and learn just as much. So it’s all about pathways.
David Yakobovitch
And those pathways include that you could land a job by contributing to open source. So we’ve been talking in today’s show that The Carpentries is looking for maintainers and who can be a maintainer, do you need to know Cplusplus like what do you need to know to be a maintainer?
Kari Jordan
Patience David they’re going to get me when I when they know to be a maintainer we the thing about our maintainer program is that we offer a very comprehensive onboarding to our maintainer program and so we for all of our programs we don’t throw you into it and say, here are, here’s a repository with 100, issues and pull requests, go handle this if you have an interest in lesson development, if you have an interest in community engagement, if you have an interest in, learning out, learning Python, learning Version Control, learning The Shell, learning #SQL and you have a couple hours one to two hours a week extra you can be a maintainer.
You don’t have to be proficient in any of, the programs you have to be patient and know how to be how to be organized and how to facilitate conversation around the lesson and again we offer a very comprehensive onboarding you’ll work directly with our current maintainers we also have associate director does a lot with our maintainer community, she’s on our core team so all of our programs, we don’t just kind of throw you in there’s a nice onboarding, you get a lot of experience community calls and things like that to help you prepare.
David Yakobovitch
And, there is a lot of diversity there it’s not just The Python, The SQL, I recall as someone who’s been a contributor over the years, that in the last couple of years, there was this heated debate about as you may recall the GitHub, GitLab battle and that’s whether it was yourself or one of your team members from carpet, she said we know someone pretty level headed.
So I actually was facilitating these GitHub conversations and I’ll tell you, it’s incredible because we put a call to the community on Twitter and we got people directly involved with Carpentry’s people who were never involved, but who followed us and it’s like we’re very much about thinking about problem solving like you said, like thinking about scientific mindset, like there’s not really a right or wrong, but like let’s objectively look at this and see why should we use this open source platform called #GitHub or why should we use this other open source platform called GitLab?
Kari Jordan
That’s what again I appreciate so much about The Carpentries and I have to tell you, David, this type of collaborative environment is not what I was used to coming from industry. I was very much trained to create and release there may be a couple of meetings as a designer or as a lead on a manufacturing program you create it, you run it, you get it out on time because it’s going to cost money.
Carpentry’s is very much different we are all about feedback, collaboration, we have a diversity of perspectives in the room not only, individuals from our one research one institution in the U.S. but indigenous persons, persons who are living in remote areas who don’t have access to the internet on a regular basis and so I really liked what you said you took a step back what are the pros and cons? It’s not just a matter of should we use this or that but what are we ultimately trying to accomplish in this lesson and how does this lesson achieve our mission? so it’s more than just, should we use GitHub or GitLab?
David Yakobovitch
Yes and it’s, of course there is new technology always on the horizon and a new curriculum on the horizon carry whether it’s like a call to action you have for our listeners of the show today.
Kari Jordan
Yes, my call to action is if you ever thought that you could never code, you thought wrong I have been in your shoes I shied away from programming for a very long time and now I’m the executive director of a nonprofit that teaches foundational coding and #datascience skills there is nothing to be afraid of because there is a community in The Carpentries that values you that appreciates your contribution and that appreciates your perspective I want you to visit Carpentries dot org, check out the opportunities that we have for mentoring see if there’s a workshop all of our workshops are online right now.
Actually so this is actually a great opportunity and great time for you to get involved or in try a workshop and don’t hesitate to contact us on Twitter at The Carpentries, If you have any questions, we are always here to answer any questions you may have the great thing about being a global community is that there is always awake paying attention and so you can ask a question anytime and expect a response from one of our community members, or from someone or the core team, don’t wait to get involved in coding. Don’t wait.
David Yakobovitch
Dr. Kari Jordan, Executive Director of The Carpentries. Thank you for joining us on The HumAIn Podcast.
Kari Jordan
Thank you so much, David.
David Yakobovitch
Thank you for listening to this episode of the HumAIn Podcast. What do you think? Did the show measure up to your thoughts on artificial intelligence, data science, future of work and developer education? Listeners, I want to hear from you so that I can offer you the most relevant trend setting and educational content on the market.
You can reach me directly by email at david@yakobovitch.com. Remember to share this episode with a friend, subscribe and leave a review on your preferred podcasting app and tune into more episodes of HumAIn.
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