Whether/how to highlight "senior instructors" (and contributors)

[gvwilson]

At the June 2014 lab meeting, there was some discussion of whether we should somehow acknowledge people who've taught a lot, contributed a lot, or both. The goal is to recognize outstanding contributions in ways that can boost people's careers; the risks are that we'll discourage other people, that people will start to game the system, or that bootcamp hosts will start to ask, "Why aren't we getting someone more experienced?" Please use this issue to discuss the idea's pros and cons, and to make suggestions about what we could implement, and how.

[wking]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 09:44:27AM -0700, Greg Wilson wrote:

The goal is to recognize outstanding contributions in ways that can
boost people's careers; …

I'm against anything more finely grained than “has passed the official
SWC instructor training”. Everyone beyond that should be a competent
instructor, which is all hosts should care about (although I think
it's fine for hosts to use instructors trained via alternate routes
too). Of course, we already recognize these folks 1. Beyond that,
I think folks can promote their contributions in their CV, and list a
SWC-side reference for verification.

[jkitzes]

I wouldn't say that I'm against, but I would be careful to make any extra recognition very quantitative rather than honorary - i.e., a badge/sticker for "has taught 10+ times", "has contributed to 3+ lessons in bc repo", etc. I think having one recognition for extensive teaching experience and one for extensive contribution to lesson materials would be a reasonable place to start. From this perspective, we want people to game the system - if they contribute lesson materials or teach a few extra times to earn the badge, that's good motivation!

[wking]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 11:19:22AM -0700, Justin Kitzes wrote:

"has contributed to 3+ lessons in bc repo"

Does “contributed” mean “landed a patch that touched a line (even a
single typo fix)” or do you have some criteria for a “significant”
contribution?

[NelleV]

SC could have the equivalent of the PSF Community Awards.
Of course the award winning people would then be chosen in a highly
subjective way, but you can't cheat the system this way.

On 27 June 2014 11:24, W. Trevor King notifications@github.com wrote:

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 11:19:22AM -0700, Justin Kitzes wrote:

"has contributed to 3+ lessons in bc repo"

Does “contributed” mean “landed a patch that touched a line (even a
single typo fix)” or do you have some criteria for a “significant”
contribution?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#575 (comment).

[jkitzes]

Does “contributed” mean “landed a patch that touched a line (even a single typo fix)” or do you have some criteria for a “significant” contribution?

That would be something to discuss - I don't know right away, but I'd tentatively suggest either (a) anything including typo fix - i.e., we're just counting files with a pull request, or (b) "first authorship" - i.e., was the person who submitted the first draft (we could allow co-authors as well). Alternatively, we could just count pull requests merged.

There are lots of other types of contributions that could be acknowledged (participation on lists, issue trackers, reviewing PRs, etc.), but these two seem like they will cover the needs/contributions of 90+% of our community.

Edit: One thing that's important, I think, is that we're not trying to separate "stellar" from "great" - we're trying to separate "actively contributing" from "teach a bit here and there". There's absolutely nothing wrong with the latter, but I can see the utility in distinguishing the former.

[BernhardKonrad]

It sounds like milestones on number of bootcamps taught makes a lot of sense because it is objective, easy to track, and impossible to game.
I like the idea of incentivising reviewing PRs as this hopefully speeds up the process. It also sounds reasonable to ask the person who does the merge to acknowledge the major reviewers.

[jiffyclub]

I do want to avoid stigmatizing new instructors. Even with quantitative markers someone could be miffed that they are getting three instructors who have taught 0-1 times. One way to avoid that is to set a sufficiently high bar for honorarium. Say badge people who have taught more than 10 courses. That way people can be suitably impressed but if someone lacks the badge there's no knowing whether they've taught zero courses or nine.

Another route for helping people could be to write guidelines for citing their work in their CVs/resumes. Saying "I've taught X courses" is easy enough (though I don't know how many I've taught...), but folks might like more advice on how to cite contributed lessons or more abstract help like reviews or mentoring.

On the topic of mentoring, "has mentored" might be an appropriate honor for senior instructors.

[wking]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 11:43:23AM -0700, Bernhard Konrad wrote:

It also sounds reasonable to ask the person who does the merge to
acknowledge the major reviewers.

It's not for statistics, but other projects including Git use a
“Reviewed-by” tag in the commit message for crediting reviewers 1.
Of course, inserting these tags requires rebasing the original series,
which may be more than we want to impose on submitters/mergers.

[rgaiacs]

I'm against anything more finely grained than “has passed the official
SWC instructor training”.

+1 to that.

I wouldn't say that I'm against, but I would be careful to make any extra
recognition very quantitative rather than honorary - i.e., a badge/sticker for
"has taught 10+ times", "has contributed to 3+ lessons in bc repo", etc. I
think having one recognition for extensive teaching experience and one for
extensive contribution to lesson materials would be a reasonable place to
start. From this perspective, we want people to game the system - if they
contribute lesson materials or teach a few extra times to earn the badge,
that's good motivation!

I'm -1 to "has taught +10 times" but I'm OK with "has taught +5 times during
Summer 2014". Since we are trying to work globally but yet most of the bootcamps
happens at Canada, US or UK we will probably discourage people that don't live
at this countries because they will not get the "has taught +10 times" quickly
but "has taught +5 times during Summer 2014" is more reasonable to accomplish.

I'm also OK with badges like "has taught +1 times at the last five years".

If someone convince me that my suggestions can discourage contributions from
anyone or are some sort of finely grained that can make bootcamp hosts start
asking "Why aren't we getting someone more experienced?" I will be -1 to it.

[PBarmby]

Following up on the above, I was thinking about bibliometrics and the example of h-index vs m-index. Maybe counting courses taught per year would work; it should help avoid stigmatizing newer people, although admittedly it doesn't help brand-new folks.

While counting bootcamps is relatively easy to do (& people can do it themselves), recognizing contributions to lesson material, etc seems to me like it's even more important. Such contributions can create a much more lasting impact since they affect everyone who subsequently uses the material, yet they are less visible to anyone on the outside. In addition to what @wking mentioned above, are there other open-source models that we can look at?

[rgaiacs]

While counting bootcamps is relatively easy to do (& people can do it
themselves), recognizing contributions to lesson material, etc seems to me
like it's even more important. Such contributions can create a much more
lasting impact since they affect everyone who subsequently uses the material,
yet they are less visible to anyone on the outside.

Mozilla Developer Network shows right below the
title of every article the top contributors to that article and a link to show
all. For a example, visit https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web since MDN
homepage didn't have contributors. Unfortunately I don't know a easy way to do
something similar for our lessons.

[wking]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 05:57:33PM -0700, r-gaia-cs wrote:

Mozilla Developer Network shows right below the title of every
article the top contributors to that article and a link to show all.

You could script this using Git to list authors, assuming we avoid
copy-paste commits that drop history (see #72, #79, #89, #114, #117),
format translations (#15, #106, #165). I do something like this for
automatically updating copyright blurbs 1, and have a configurable
section adjusting for incomplete VCS history 2.

[mikej888]

Tell hosts who ask "Why aren't we getting someone more experienced?" that instructors are volunteers and if the hosts want to hold out for a more experienced instructor being available they're free to do so but it may reduce their chances of a boot camp happening when they want (if at all).

Position the badges in the context of "contribution" or "effort" instead of "seniority" (noting that because someone has done more of something it doesn't necessarily make them more "senior") "Badges are awarded in recognition of those individuals who have contributed a significant amount time|effort|original material to Software Carpentry".

[mikej888]

A colleague suggested that it can be made clear to hosts that the number of boot camps is an indicator of time and effort given, rather than of quality of the instructor (for which the fact that have done instructor training should be enough). Accepting this, they then suggested that rewarding badges for time/effort might have an additional upside of encouraging more people to volunteer to do more to get that next badge!