2022 Report. A Year of Changes and Growth.

Last updated on 27/01/2023 24 min read

2022 was a very special year for the MetaDocencia community 🍎. After two years of growing by fostering education in virtual environments, we consolidated that experience and became stronger to face new challenges to come 🚀. In this report we share our year of changes, growth, consolidation and learning, along with resources for the entire community 📍.

Collaborative actions developed in 2022 📑:

We Grew As A Team

Since our establishment as a voluntary organization in 2020, MetaDocencia had a great community of collaborators, who made valuable contributions to our present 👐.

Since the end of 2021 we have fiscal sponsorship from Code for Science & Society (CS&S) and funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), as we shared in this post 🤝.

In 2022, we completed the first stage of our transition to a much more inclusive and engaging organization that no longer relies on volunteer labor to function. We also shared the news of our expanding team, which gives us solid foundations to continue growing! 🌟

After the first open job search in our history, we incorporated new people and roles, reorganizing tasks and functions in the following current work teams, which will also function in 2023 🗃️:

  • Teaching: Ire, Iván, Jesi, Lau, Marie, Moni, Nico, Pato, Romi, Laurel, Meli y Paz (coordinates).

  • Communication: Juli, Laurel (coordinates)

  • Communities: Meli, Laurel (coordinates)

  • Accesibility: Iván, Marie, Pato (coordinates)

  • Community Guidelines: Moni, Romi, Paz (coordinates)

  • Administration: Romi, Paz (coordinates)

  • Infrastructure: Ire, Meli (coordinates)

  • Impact Measurement: Jesi, Meli (coordinates)

  • Executive Direction: Lau y Nico

We also re-organized processes, meetings and documents to record and improve the collaborative work on a daily basis 🌱. In the link we share a document that structures our teamwork since 2022:

🔗 Guidelines to strengthen collaborative work in MetaDocencia (in Spanish)

At the end of the year, we shared a virtual meeting with music and games, in which we chose the sounds that best represented our year, we presented a significant object for each person, and we toasted to celebrate everything we had lived.

It is a pleasure to work as a team!

En the photo, the full MetaDocencia team. In order, from left to right and up to bottom: Row 1 - Patricia Loto, Laura Ascenzi, Irene Vazano, Jesica Formoso; Row 2 - Mónica Alonso, Melissa Black, Romina Pendino, Laura Ación; Row 3 - Julián Buede, Nicolás Palopoli, Paz Mïguez, Mariela Rajngewerc; Row 4 - Iván Poggio and Pancho, his dog.

In the image, the entire MetaDocencia team. In order of appearance, from left to right and from top to bottom:

  • Row 1: Patricia Loto, Laura Ascenzi, Irene Vazano, Jesica Formoso;

  • Row 2: Monica Alonso, Melissa Black, Romina Pendino, Laura Ación;

  • Row 3: Julián Buede, Nicolás Palopoli, Paz Miguez, Mariela Rajngewerc;

  • Row 4: Iván Poggio and Pancho, his dog 🐶.

We Contributed

New project: Cloud infrastructure And Open Science Training for Latin American and African Communities

In 2022 we announced that the collaborative proposal described in this blogpost was approved for funding by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ⚡.

Our goal is to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service that enables community-based cloud-native workflows in the biosciences. We will promote values of open and inclusive community practices, the infrastructure that enables these practices, and a “train the trainers” approach that empowers community leaders to share expertise in cloud infrastructure with others in their communities. Our focus will be on communities in Latin America and Africa, and we hope to learn how this model could be extended to other global communities that are historically marginalized from large-scale scientific infrastructure projects.

This is a collaborative effort between 2i2c, The Carpentries, Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Open Life Science and MetaDocencia.

🔗 Access the original proposal in Zenodo

Open Source and Open Science in Latin America

From the exchange between Laura Ación, Gonzalo Peña-Castellanos and Fernando Pérez, and with the technical assistance of Laurel, Melissa and Julián, we compiled this publication in which we analyze the barriers of access to open science in Latin America and which actions to take to promote participation in the creative process for all people 🚧🗺️.

Also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Our purpose is to open the debate on how we can make the development of open source and open science a more global effort, in which all cultures are truly welcomed as equals. The conversation continued during the CZI Open Science 2022 Annual Meeting that we report in the events section.

We Formalized Our Governance

During the second half of 2022 we began to collaboratively develop our governance. We intended to design a transparent model for strategic decision-making, designed from and for our cultural and regional context.

After

  • 32 internal activities

  • 8 open meetings

  • 7 specialists participated as speakers

  • +55 hours of synchronous work

  • +4 months of exchange

… we agreed and defined our inner work guidelines, governance bodies and collaboration agreements.

Watch the video summary of the process

The implementation of our new governance began in December 2022, with the constitution of a new Advisory Committee (AC) and the organization of its first meeting according to the updated operating principles. The AC, together with the Executive Team, the Coordination Team and other work teams, articulate their work so that decision making and the development of activities strengthen MetaDocencia’s work and mission.

We plan to review our governance after the first year of implementation, challenging ourselves to keep an open perspective and to question what is not working.

In 2023, we will publish and make available the principles of our governance.

Huge thanks to all the people and communities who participated and supported the development of our governance! 👏

Speakers at open meetings: Beatriz Busaniche, Fabrizio Scrollini, Malvika Sharan and Andrea Sánchez-Tapia (with Spanish-English live interpretation), Andrés Piazza, Mayra Botta, Diego Pando.

MetaDocencia Governance Team: Irene Vazano, Iván Poggio, Jesica Formoso, Laura Ación, Laura Ascenzi, Melissa Black, Mónica Alonso, Nicolás Palopoli, Paz Míguez, Romina Pendino.

🔗 Read more about the development of our governance:.

🔗 Documentation of our governance (English). Also available in Spanish.

We Taught

Started with a Bang

We started 2022 offering two editions of the workshops Introduction to Online Teaching Essentials and one edition of the Zoom Workshop, some of our first synchronous online workshops to introduce effective teaching practices.

Also during the first semester we taught several online workshops based on the R programming language: one edition of Generating Interactive Tutorials with the {learnr} Package, designed to create interactive educational tutorials (offered in partnership with R-Ladies Johannesbourg); plus two editions of From Spreadsheets to R, together with the Software Sustainability Institute (United Kingdom), to assist in the transition to R for working with data; and three a la carte versions of these two workshops, co-organized as meetups with local chapters of R-Ladies Argentina. These activities were led by Paola Corrales, Elio Campitelli and Yanina Bellini Saibene, who co-founded MetaDocencia, and collaborated with MetaDocencia until the end of May 2022.

They also led the Book Club in Spanish Teaching Tech Together. It was composed of eight meetings with presentations and moderation by different people who collaborated with MetaDocencia. The goal was to share and deepen on Enseñando Tecnología en Comunidad, the Spanish version of the book by Greg Wilson, who participated in the last of these meetings, with simultaneous interpretation Spanish-English 📚.

Although some of these courses and events are no longer active, the materials remain available on the web for those who wish to learn more or replicate the experience.

Yanina, Paola and Nicolás Palopoli led the third The Carpentries Train-the-Trainer Workshop organized by MetaDocencia fully in Spanish. As in previous occasions, at the end of the workshop we certified 12 people from 5 countries as Carpentries instructors.

New Workshops 2022-2023

In the last quarter of 2022 we conducted internal pilot editions of new training proposals, such as the upcoming MetaEvaluations: teaching by evaluating, developed by Romina Pendino, Irene Vazano and the course design team 🌟.

We started to update our courses following our Stylebook, with design improved by Julian. Look what a nice new presentation template we have! 😍.

🧑‍🏫 The first updated workshop was Introduction to Online Teaching Essentials: we renamed it Present! Resources for Active Meetings, we took the pandemic out of it and introduced new resources for managing synchronous teaching spaces whether in face-to-face, hybrid or online environments.

🧑‍💻 Our team also developed a proposal for those who want to learn how to use Zoom with the NVDA screen reader, oriented to visually impaired people and teachers of visually impaired people, which is our new Accessible Zoom with Screen Reader 🆕.

The open editions of the workshops ¡Present! Resources for Active Meetings were led by Irene Vazano, Nicolás Palopoli and Laura Ación; and Accessible Zoom with Screen Reader was led by Iván Poggio and Irene Vazano.

More Than 100 People Registered for our Open Editions!

Those who attended gave us very good feedback to continue working on adjusting our proposals for 2023, when we will launch new workshops: Ethics and Social Impacts of Artificial Intelligence and Resources for learning and teaching Bioinformatics, among others! 💯.

We Did Our Research

Research on the Effect of MetaDocencia Workshops and Courses on Teacher Self-Efficacy

The Impact Measurement team, integrated by Jesica Formoso, Melissa Black, Nicolás Palopoli and Debora Burin, is investigating the effect of MetaDocencia courses and workshops to measure the impact of this type of training on teachers’ perception of their effectiveness in transmitting knowledge 🕵️.

That’s why we may ask participants in our workshops to complete an online survey about their self-perception as teachers, giving consent to use the responses for research.

The study is funded by MetaDocencia through CZI funding (Grant Number 2021-239366), with fiscal sponsorship from Code for Science & Society and is conducted in collaboration with the University of Buenos Aires UBACYT 2020 project code 20020190100077BA.

In 2023 we intend to share the results with the community, applying open science principles to manage and publish the information responsibly.

We Published

In 2022 we took a systematic approach to share our publications in Zenodo 🤯:

🔗 https://zenodo.org/communities/metadocencia/

If you are interested in adding posts that are related to MetaDocencia to our community on the platform, send them to 🤗.

We also summarized our description in a prospectus to introduce ourselves to non-Spanish speaking communities 📃.

In addition, new posts with useful information for our community are periodically published in our Blog https://www.metadocencia.org/post/ . We also invite you to publish news in this section by sending us your text to ✍️.

Here are some posts shared this year to continue learning together 🤓:

What do we take away from a synchronous meeting: content or experience?

In this publication, Jesica Formoso and Laurel Ascenzi share reflections on the spaces for growth and orientation of the next training proposals, recovering the contribution of who attended our courses between March 2020 and October 2021. Through a word cloud we tried to answer the question “what do we gain from a virtual meeting: content or experience?”

🔗 Read more: https://www.metadocencia.org/en/post/word-cloud/

Best Practices For Creating Accessible Presentations

On the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Mariela Rajngewerc and Patricia A. Loto shared some tips for generating accessible presentations 🙋🥰. In the publication you can download a checklist to reviewcompliance with the suggestions.

🔗 Read more (in Spanish): https://www.metadocencia.org/post/presentaciones-accesibles/

How to Organize Tabs and Windows to Give a Synchronous Virtual Class?

In this publication, Romina Pendino and Nicolás Palopoli recommend possible ways to organize windows to avoid losing sight of any communication channel with people who attend our courses.

🔗 Read more (in Spanish): https://www.metadocencia.org/post/organizar-ventanas

We Participated in Events

XII Argentinean Congress of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

MetaDocencia and OLS were traveling around Argentina! Our co-executive director Nicolás Palopoli and OLS researcher and program coordinator Paz Bernaldo shared the individual and joint efforts of our communities at the XII Argentinean Congress of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (Corrientes, Nov. 24-25) and at the XVI Biologists in Network Meeting (Mar del Plata, Nov. 14-15), respectively.

Ibero-American Congress of Open Science

Melissa Black and Laurel Ascenzi represented MetaDocencia at the First #OpenScience Ibero-American Congress. The event was meant to generate a space for Ibero-American dialogue between academia, the State, and civil society on the right to science and the importance of promoting a transformation in the way science is understood from an inclusive, open, participatory, and responsible perspective.

🔗 Presentation: https://zenodo.org/record/7311765#.Y39fOUzwT

Einstein Foundation Symposium on Global Dynamics in Responsible Research

The Einstein Foundation invited us to participate in its virtual symposium on Global Dynamics in Responsible Research (web en inglés) in which we developed the following activities:

  • Laurel Ascenzi and Paz Míguez gave a talk on “Co-creating and Teaching Open Science from the Global South”, in which they raised the asymmetry of power and privilege between Latin America and high-income regions based on this blogpost.

🔗 Presentation: https://zenodo.org/record/7388194#.Y480rnaZNPY

🔗 Presentation: https://zenodo.org/record/7387392#.Y49TR3aZNPY

ICOTS-11

Nicolas Palopoli, representing several co-authors of our team, presented the work done during the first two years of MetaDocencia at the international statistics teaching conference ICOTS-11.

🔗 Bilingual presentation: http://tiny.cc/metadocencia-icots11

CZI Open Science 2022 Annual Meeting

MetaDocencia was part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Open Science 2022 Annual Meeting, which took place in California, USA, on September 18-21 2022, along with funded and affiliated projects. As co-executive director of this project, Laura Ación attended the meeting in person.

Besides participating in various sessions and sharing with colleagues from other global communities, Laura co-organized and co-moderated a panel on “Building and Supporting Open Source Science Communities in Africa and Latin America” together with Emmy Tsang (Open Life Science/Invest in Open Infrastructure).

Panelists: - Selene L. Fernández Valverde (CABANAnet, Mexico) - Angela Okune (Code for Science and Society, United States) - Anelda van der Walt (Talarify, South Africa) - Thomas Mboa (Mboa Lab, Cameroon) - Fernán Federici (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile e Instituto iBio Millenium, Chile)

This plenary panel highlighted the idea that everyone should be able to contribute, participate and benefit from the development of science and technology 💡. This principle is fundamental to open science and open source as global efforts.

In this thread we shared some of the ideas discussed to continue empowering ideas collaboratively 💪.

We Measured our Impact

  • 142 persons applied to our first open job search! We received applications from 11 different countries and +90% of the people did not know about MetaDocencia before applying.
  • We held 5 pilot workshops and 3 open editions of new workshops.
  • We organized 17 events with an average of 15 attendees per activity.
  • More than 100 people from 16 different countries registered for the governance events! Their input was very important for the Governance team to advance the development process.

How they found out about these events:

The participants represented different communities:

Algunas de las comunidades que estuvieron representadas en los encuentros de gobernanza

  • Our YouTube videos exceeded 2,900 views!
  • The different editions of our newsletter achieved an average of 35% open rate.
  • In 2022 alone, users visited our website +12377 times.
  • Contributions to the MetaDocencia website repository via GitHub reached 1172 new commits in 2022 (1721 in total!) and 502 views in the repository.
  • We shared virtual spaces for over 90 hours of meetings!
  • Our Slack accumulated more than 56000 messages exchanged among the community 💬.

In addition, we received recognitions and appearances in mass media ✨:

Melissa Black will be an OLS/SSI Fellow in 2023

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) announced the 18 Fellows for 2023 and Melissa Black was selected through a collaboration with Open Life Science (OLS). She will therefore be part of the first cohort of OLS/SSI Fellows. Congratulations! 🎉

🔗 In this document you can see her work proposal called “EspañOLS: empowering Open Science ambassadors in Spanish-speaking communities” 👏.

🔗 More information about the profiles and selection in the official ISS announcement.

Premios Democracia (Democracy Awards)

Our co-founder Laura Ación was nominated for the Democracy Awards in the Science and Technology (in Spanish) category!

Since 2009, Caras y Caretas awards Argentine or Latin American people who stand out for their humanitarian and democratic values and for the quality of their works and activities in which they claim, defend and contribute to these values (in Spanish).

Congratulations to the winner, Juan Pablo Paz, and to all the people who participated on behalf of our community.

🔗 Access to article in Página 12 newspaper (in Spanish): https://t.co/9nK8VqjFrz

Journalistic Articles

Laura Ación was interviewed by different media:

We Built Community

In 2022, we worked hard to promote access to information of interest and to connect with our entire community.

🍎✨ We relaunched our institutional image, including the first redesign of our logo.

🧑‍💻 We updated our website to offer a friendly and accessible navigation, adding the Consulting section for the development of new projects with other organizations;

🥰 🥰 We generated content of interest for our community through our social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slack, ¡also YouTube!);

💌 💌 We created our newsletter and renamed it collectively as Notes from MetaDocencia. To generate it, we collaboratively plan the agenda and share it also in English through Slack channels of international friend communities.

⚛️ We also participated in activities and shared training, meeting and discussion spaces with more than a dozen communities of friends from Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the United States, with whom we collaborate on a daily basis and hope to continue strengthening ties in 2023. We promote and disseminate their projects and offers, to generate a network that enhances our mission and the mission of those who are working for open science.

❤️ For the Collaborators Team, distributed in different cities, provinces and countries, we prepared and sent an end-of-year MetaDocente gift, to approach distances and stickers, give our appreciation for a whole year together, and also alfajores 😋.

Fotos de la preparación de las cajitas de presentes MetaDocentes y stickers en termo y computadora

Photos by Romi, Ire and Laurel

🥂 In the end-of-year meeting we collaboratively built the wish for our entire community:

“💫 We wish you a 2023 of learning and transformations, genuine connections with other people and communities, that allow us to build networks and shared spaces.”

Imagen de manos que sostienen una estrellita y mensaje de saludo

Planning 2023

In addition to new proposals for workshops and events organized by MetaDocencia, we have already confirmed participation in the csv,conf,7 and we are planning to participate in other conferences and events. We intend 2023 to be a year of exchange and learning together with communities that also seek to strengthen open science, to make the production, communication and application of scientific and technical knowledge globally equitable, in line with our vision of the future.

We will also continue to promote this discussion, with the aim of enriching the debate and designing collective responses to asymmetries and inequities. In this way, we continue working to advance innovation with a local perspective that responsibly builds scientific and technical capacities, in line with our mission 🙌.

Another wish for 2023 is to continue meeting in person, to get to know each other and share the joy of believing in what we do.

We invite you to join us, be part of the community and participate in the proposals and opportunities to come 🌈.

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