TDCC-NES Bottleneck projects

Status: project proposal in draft phase

Modern research in the NES domain increasingly requires the practical ability of researchers to write and share code. In fact, the “need for improvement of computational reproducibility practices” is identified as one of the key challenges for the domain in the TDCC NES Roadmap. While there are plenty of free resources available to learn coding basics, it can be difficult to effectively implement these skills. 

Organizers of local programming learning communities at TU Delft, Utrecht University, VU Amsterdam, and Leiden University have successfully created accessible and inclusive spaces to connect and support researchers. They regularly organize presentations and practical sessions on best coding practices with topics relevant to the NES disciplines. (e.g. Geospatial Data Analysis with R).

With support from TDCC-NES they plan to join forces to grow a national network of Programming Cafés using the CAFE (Code Along, Feel Empowered) method. A common platform would enable exchange of experiences and original resources (i.e. the CAFE Playbook) to facilitate the creation and sustainability of new Programming Cafés. This platform would aim to engage NES researchers across the Netherlands in community learning about coding.

Status: project proposal in development

Data and computational skills are essential for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. There is a need to increase digital literacy amongst researchers, but too few instructors can teach these skills. The Carpentries is an international initiative dedicated to training foundational coding and data science skills, providing well-developed open-access materials and featuring a robust instructor certification program. The Carpentries network in The Netherlands trains and fosters an active community of instructors that promote the importance of software and data in research. We propose to address the shortage of instructors in the NES domain by training 50 new Carpentries instructors, irrespective of their institutional affiliation. With these instructors we will organize 4 workshops on NES domain specific content across the Netherlands, to increase digital skills of researchers and to connect people and new instructors in local hubs. We will team-up with local coding cafes (TDCC-NES Bottleneck project) to recruit instructors, offer a platform to practice their teaching skills and to build local training hubs.

Besides training capacity, there is in the NES domain also a need to develop new training materials on digital skills. We will collaborate with coding cafes to identify current bottlenecks and gaps in the digital skills training. We will have a call for a collaborative lesson development program and pitch this at the coding cafes. Three teams of 2-3 people can join the Carpentries collaborative lesson development training to develop their own open access and reproducible lesson materials. This is a new training and will be delivered as a collaboration between the Carpentries organization and the Netherlands eScience Center. Materials from the newly developed lessons can be trialed for example at the coding cafes for feedback and fine-tuning.

Together, this program addresses both the need for improvement of digital competencies within the domain and increases training capacity

Lead applicant: Reinder Radersma, NWO-I
Listed project partners: TU Delft, EUR, VU Amsterdam, UVA , Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HVA) , Tilburg University, Leiden University, Netherlands eScience Center