Hi all! Katrin, thanks for starting this thread and everyone for your comments.
I think it's safe to say that at least in Africa at present 80+% of our instructors have no experience with containers, virtual machines, etc nor have access to university infrastructure or support from their institution so that they will get help setting these things up for a workshop. Many universities don't have the IT capacity (skills and/or time) to support most of the solutions we're talking about here. If they do have skills and resources, it won't be accessible to the type of people who form the bulk of our instructor pool - graduate students, postdocs, early career researchers. It may in some cases be available to what is known as the *rock star researchers*. Unfortunately we have not really been able to attract that pool of people to the South African Carpentry community in large numbers. Also, in the 40+ workshops I've been involved in, I have realised that the more rural one goes, the more variety one should expect. Viruses, pirate copies of windows and office, laptops with 1 GB RAM (not good for VMs), ancient operating systems, poor internet, blocked websites, limited vocabulary to describe challenges experienced on computers (computational vocabulary not language barrier), isolation (nobody around trying to do something similar) are all things that are very common once one moves away from the more privileged, established universities. Despite all of this, we have been able to run workshops and in most cases been able to get software running (in workshops that I've personally been involved in I would guess 95% of the time). It does mean that sometimes we don't start the actual workshop until after morning tea time and that once we switch to another tool, often the installation pains and delays start all over again (except when we dedicate time to ensure everything is installed at the beginning of the workshop and do not move forward until everyone's on board). I'm personally in favour of helping people to install software on their laptops even if it takes a lot of Googling and soliciting support from others. I realise that this approach will not always work. The reality is that for those computers that can't get Python, R, or OpenRefine installed, a Virtual machine will probably be too resource intensive to solve the problem. Basing a solution on anything that requires constant access to internet is at this stage definitely not the solution for the largest part of our audience in Africa. The good news is that internet access is constantly improving, laptops are getting more accessible and affordable, university IT is (slowly) learning how to support students/researchers. For now, my solution to the installation problem is (where possible) to arrive with flash drives with all software, data, and lessons downloaded and add extra time to the workshops where possible to ensure there is enough teaching time left after the installations are done. Furthermore we encourage people to share laptops when someone's laptop is really giving problems. It's helping us to understand the learners' research environments after the workshop ends and it's about meeting our learners where they're at. Kind regards, Anelda On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 4:39 AM, paul.harrison via discuss < [email protected]> wrote: > > We usually run a server in our university's cloud, which is fairly similar > to solutions several others have discussed. We run JupyterHub, > RStudioServer, and Etherpad on this. Both JupyterHub and RStudioServer > provide terminals for command line tasks. > > One downside to this is that setting up and administering a server > requires knowledge beyond what is taught by Carpentries workshops. This > might be something for which a workshop could be developed. I'm a little > wary of virtual machine or docker solutions -- technically they provide a > reproducible environment, but without knowing how to construct them > they're not something people can take and fully make their own. > > best regards, > Paul Harrison > Monash University Bioinformatics Platform > > *The Carpentries <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/latest>* / discuss / > see discussions <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss> + > participants <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members> + > delivery > options <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription> > Permalink > <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T963f4b806cda01a2-Me7ef2af0366c573bd2e90ab4> > ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T963f4b806cda01a2-M91493c952925201de5ccc308 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
