Growing a Data-ready Continent
Anelda Van der Walt
Juan Steyn
10.6084/m9.figshare.5948113.v1
https://figshare.com/articles/presentation/Growing_a_Data-ready_Continent/5948113
The current acute shortage of computational, data management and
analysis skills amongst researchers and practitioners has been described
in numerous publications. Programmes have been developed to address
this shortage at institutions globally. Interventions aim to provide
training in multiple ways, including: short courses, bootcamps, and
Massive Open Online Courses. Some “data science” initiatives target
people with formal education in computationally fields while other
programmes try to upskill applied researchers with limited formal
computational and data training.
Despite the availability of all these resources, the growth of data
scientific skills and competencies are not keeping pace with the demand
for these skills. It is time to think creatively about more rapidly
building “data-ready” communities in industries as well as in academia.
Over the past few years, exciting new international initiatives, have
emerged. Software, Data, and Library Carpentry are non-profit, volunteer
organisations that develop training material, train instructors,
organise workshops to teach computing and data skills, and support the
development of communities of practice. They have found that mobilising
and empowering people at all career stages to share their knowledge with
peers offer a simple solution to building skills capacity, thus not
depending on large amounts of money or highly ranked government
officials or acclaimed professors and experts.
Carpentry workshops teach open-source tools like R, Python, Shell, SQL,
OpenRefine, and git to people with little or no prior programming
experience. The workshops are typically run over two to three days.
Workshop assessment data shows many participants leave workshops with a
sense that they too can learn to code and work better with data.
Since 2013 almost 30 Software, Data, and Library Carpentry workshops
have run in seven African countries, with many more in the pipeline.
These workshops attracted participants from disciplines including life
sciences, engineering, health sciences, social sciences and humanities,
mathematics and statistics, computer science, as well as support
environments like the libraries and IT.
In 2015 the first South African Carpentry instructors participated in
online instructor training and four instructors qualified during that
year. Two in-person instructor training events were also held in South
Africa with a third planned for October 2017. To date, more than 60
African researchers and students have gone through instructor training.
These trainees have represented countries including South Africa,
Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Benin, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon,
Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Malawi.
The potential to run workshops at a variety of institutions across the
continent, is increasing daily through the help of numerous funders,
supporters, volunteers, students, researchers, and champions. The entire
vision of building computing and data science capacity and communities
of practice in Africa, relies entirely on the collaboration across
continents, institutions, disciplines, and career stages with reliable
internet access playing a crucial role in all of this.<br><br>These slides were presented at the Ubuntunet Connect Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on 2 November 2017.<br>
2018-03-05 14:17:26
Africa
Digital literacy
research data science
data science
human networks
Software Carpentry
Data Carpentry
data science training
Ubiquitous Computing