Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What do I need to have to run a Carpentries workshop?

Objectives

• Name three things you need to run a workshop.

• Explain the difference between a self-organized and Carpentry organized workshop.

• Given a potential audience, choose which type of Carpentries workshop would be most appropriate.

There are three components that are essential to running a workshop.

• Finding a space
• Finding people
  • Instructors
  • Helpers
  • Audience

There is more work to be done after this, but these are the three things that need to be locked down, or you don’t have a workshop.

Place

Workshops require space. This is usually the most important thing to start with; not just because it’s needed, but because it often needs to be booked weeks to months in advance.

This link has a great list of qualities to look for in a workshop space: https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/hosts_instructors/workshop_needs.html

People, Part 1: Instructors and Helpers

People, Part 2: Audience

You may be on fire to run a Carpentries workshop, and may even have roped some friends or colleagues into helping you, but it’ll be a lot of effort for nothing if you don’t start with at least some idea of an audience in mind.

Places to start looking for an audience:

• your own experience
• target groups
• connections

A word of caution: especially if this is your first time organizing a workshop, make sure that expectations are managed.

https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/workshop_administration/email_templates.html#from-instructors-and-hosts

Checklist

Print out the form here (also included below) to help you with this stage of workshop planning.

Key Points

• To run a workshop, you need 3 things: a room, instructors/helpers, and an audience.

• If you can find at least 1 local Carpentry-certified instructor and another instructor who is qualified, you can probably run a self-organized workshop.

• For a Carpentry organized workshop, you rely on the Carpentry organizations to find you one (or two) instructors, and help with some of the organizational details.

• DC vs SWC vs LC