Discussion Lead: George Karypis
Scribe:
Participants:
- Richard Brower
- Dennis Castleberry
- John Cazes
- Jodi Hadden
- Eric Heien
- Chathura Herath
- Gideon Juve
- Murat Keceli
- Suresh Marru
- David McQueen
- Manish Parashar
- Ivan Rodero
- Jay Roloff
- Shawn Shadden
- Ross Walker
- Julie Wernert
- Vineet Yadav
Questions:
Education/Outreach/Training
- What are our projects doing for project-specific training? Two useful templates discussed this morning:
- TACC "Defensive Program" course series teaches people basics like using the shell up to parallel programming and visualization tools.
- Several groups had examples of internal discipline, having long-standing teams to train new project members, having a well-designed code base to show new developers how to do things.
- How do we go beyond the previous two approaches? Every university should have #1. How do you encourage #2?
- How can we best connect to other training efforts?
- To what end? To consolidate training efforts (is this necessarily a good thing?) or simply to learn how others are doing training? It depends on what we want to achieve. If we want to find out what the best training paradigms are, perhaps we could look at empirical studies on the topic as well, as we should not rely on anecdotal evidence alone. (dc)
- What constitutes effective connections to curricula for our projects?
- Having training for our software/projects embedded in the curriculum, then covered either by us or someone intimately familiar with the software/project. Perhaps the best candidate to provide training for the software/project may be a faculty member and dedicated user of the software/project with social ties to the group. (dc)
- How can we succeed in bringing underrepresented groups into our efforts in as many roles as possible?
- Be aware of stereotype threat. Underrepresented groups who are negatively stereotyped tend to conform to the stereotype because of performance anxiety associated with the stereotype. A classic example is women who are led to believe that they are genetically destined to perform less well in mathematics; the same holds of verbal skills for men. To combat this, we should try not to bring these stereotypes to mind when we recruit. (dc)
- The answer could very well depend on the underrepresented group in question. Are we to target any in particular? To bring more women into the technical roles of a project may require one technique (eliminating stereotype threat, educating and being educated about the gender issues that surround women and science) while bringing Alaskan Natives may require broadcasting the message in a certain way. In general, I think individual appeal to the given group would have more impact than lumping all the target groups together in a single broadcast invitation (e.g. "calling all women, African Americans, Alaskan Natives, etc."). (dc)
Notes: