Open science cloud infrastructure and training for communities in Latin America and Africa

The Catalyst Project aims to enable cloud-native research in the biosciences for communities based in Latin America and Africa that are historically marginalised from large-scale scientific infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure can be inaccessible for many reasons, such as the expertise needed to adminster the system, the skills needed to enable cloud-native workflows, and the development of communities of practice centred around contextualised support and knowledge transfer.

This talk shares experiences and lessons learned in delivering a collaborative interactive computing service model, with a particular focus on

- collaborative lesson development
- workshop delivery
- localisation of training material for Latin American communities.

Collaborative lesson development is an approach to lesson design developed by The Carpentries that embeds good practices in curriculum design, open-source collaboration and iterative improvement. We showcase the "Hub Champion Training" lesson based on this framework, intended for community leaders to learn the fundamentals of using and managing their hub, as well as providing user support to their communities.

Workshop delivery for global communities across many time zones can be logistically challenging. We share a few useful tips on lessons learned around the topic of accessibility and engagement.

Localisation of training materials is driven by our partnership with MetaDocencia. Spanish-language content is available to widen access and participation in the training, delivered in the community's preferred language. This talk shares some reflective points on integrating translations into a continuous development workflow.

A recording of this session is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GFB3uPI_nLg

This work was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.