MetaDocencia awarded 2-year grant and joins CS&S

Code for Science & Society is thrilled to welcome MetaDocencia as a fiscally sponsored project, funded by a new two-year grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)! MetaDocencia is moving full speed ahead to the next level!

What is MetaDocencia? MetaDocencia is an inclusive and collaborative community that improves education by empowering instructors from underserved countries. MetaDocencia nurtures a community of Spanish-speaking educators by teaching concrete, evidence-based, and student-centered educational methods. MetaDocencia focuses on teaching technical skills for open and reproducible computational science to Spanish-speaking researchers and instructors from Latin America and other geographies. Special attention is paid to the development of open, reusable, and accessible resources to foster effective reproducible research training practices.

Our history: CS&S has been proud to support MetaDocencia as an Event Fund grantee in the inaugural class of CS&S Event Fund Awards and the second cohort. These awards covered only a small percentage of MetaDocencia’s true costs. Now, thanks to joining CS&S fiscally sponsored project and a CZI two-year grant, MetaDocencia will get to its next level.

Looking ahead to the future: Supported by this new grant from CZI, MetaDocencia will go from a mostly volunteer-based organization to a sustainable organization. MetaDocencia will focus on nurturing a community of Spanish-speaking Open Science educators. The level of impact and growth MetaDocencia has experienced in less than two years was not sustainable on mostly volunteer time. Joining CS&S fiscal sponsorship program will connect the MetaDocencia team to the socio-technical infrastructure that CS&S has developed over years of incubating communities like MetaDocencia. Alongside stable CZI funding for two years, MetaDocencia’s team will be able to act strategically and think long-term to facilitate the development of other Global-South-centered communities of practice for open and reproducible research.

Both CS&S and MetaDocencia believe in the need for culturally and geographically diverse communities of practice. The languages spoken in underserved regions and local challenges related to the implementation of new skills for Open Science need better representation in the global Open Science community. If you believe that you or your community would benefit from MetaDocencia’s work, please reach out to the MetaDocencia’s team, or join their Slack. Stay tuned for MetaDocencia’s events in Spanish and the release of two new hands-on workshops to build Open Science capacity in 2022!

This post is cross-posted with CS&S.