Hi,

I am a post-doctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Information at the
University of Toronto and I work closely with Mozilla in Toronto.  Please
find info on a free, introductory software development workshop for
librarians, staff and students listed below.  If you already have the
skills being covered in the workshop, I'd appreciate any promotional help
you can offer to reach others in Toronto.

*Toronto software development workshop for librarians Jan 13-14, 2014*

Are you a librarian or information professional or other library staff
member who wants to learn more about the basics of software development?
Over time, software development skills could help you:

   - Understand or build upon code created by another library or institution
   - Optimize a workflow for converting MARC records
   - Conduct sentiment analysis on large data sets from Twitter


If these or other software development topics interest you, we are going to
be running a free Software Carpentry workshop at Mozilla's office in
downtown Toronto on January 13-14, 2014.  We were wondering if you, your
colleagues, or your graduate students would be interested in taking part?

Mozilla is an organization whose mission includes teaching computing
concepts and we are eager to work with librarians and information
professionals.   Our usual two-day curriculum for a 40-person workshop
includes:

The Unix shell (but we're really teaching how to automate repetitive tasks);

   - Git and GitHub (but we're really teaching how to use version control
   to track and share your work);
   - Python or R (but we're really teaching how to grow a program in a
   structured, modular, testable, reusable way); and
   - Databases (but we're really teaching the difference between structured
   and unstructured data).


All work is done on participants’ own laptops, so they can go back to work
with a functioning setup.

We're funded by the Sloan Foundation and Mozilla; we've helped over 4100
people in the last year, and two independent assessments in the spring of
2012 confirmed that what we're doing actually helps.  If this sound
interesting, please register at
http://gvwilson.github.io/2014-01-13-toronto/

Thanks,
Dr. Greg Wilson
Mozilla Science Lab / Software Carpentry
http://software-carpentry.org


-- 
Karen Louise Smith
Mitacs Elevate Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

...find me at Mozilla, the University of Toronto or at
www.karenlouisesmith.net