Last week was CarpentryCon at University College Dublin, Ireland.

This event is the key community-building and networking event in The Carpentries, an organization teaching foundational computational, coding, and data science skills to researchers worldwide. Bérénice was there to represent Galaxy and the Freiburg Galaxy team.

The event started with 2 days (May 28-29) of Computational Skills for Data Analysis (Data Carpentry) workshop. Bérénice, with Jason Williams and Malvika Sharan, trained there: Data Organization, Cloud Genomics, Introduction to Command line and R for Genomics.

The conference per se started on Wednesday. The theme of the conference was “Building Locally, Connecting Globally”, a theme that was really present during the whole conference. It started with a first keynote speach “Focus on Allies” by Valeria Aurora, which taught us all some new strategies to support diversity and inclusion. It was followed by a story Circle Icebreaker and some time for networking.

Afterwards, the conference was a combination of 1-hour workshops / intensive discussions on diverse topics (e.g. community building, inclusion, leadership), lightning talks, a poster session and 3 other keynote speaches:

• “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Ike Quebec” by Greg Wilson on how to leave
• “The Clustal Package Since the Late 1980s: Carpentry with Duct Tape and Six Inch Nails” by Desmond Higgins: a recap of bioinformatic software development before Open Source and GitHub
• “It Takes a (global) Village” by Anelda van der Walt and the whole African Task Force

Bérénice was giving a 4’ Lightning talk and presenting a poster about the Galaxy Training Network (“Community-Driven Training for Biological Data Analysis with the Galaxy Training Network”). She also co-lead a breakout session on FAIR science.

This conference was really intense in many ways (discussion, meeting, topics, ideas, etc).

Check out more activity about this event on Twitter