Hi All,

There's a Software Carpentry (SC) workshop set up for the 2 days just before BIS TDWG 2016. It's an opportunity to see what SC is all about and for anyone attending to stretch or enhance their data skills a bit. You can read about the course content on the course wiki:

http://idigbio.github.io/2016-12-03-tdwg-costa-rica/

Core topics include:

• automating tasks using the Unix shell
• structured programming in Python, R, or MATLAB, and
• version control using Git or Mercurial

We plan to offer an additional half-day of training focused on using the big data available from the iDigBio http://www.idigbio.org project. This may include programming with web APIs, distributed computation with Apache Spark, or similar topics.

There are still some slots left. So if you, or perhaps a student you know who is going to attend BIS TDWG 2016, please pass along news about this opportunity.

Best, Deb, Matt, Dimitrios, Nicky, et al