Noam Ross on The Carpentries

RFP: Consultancy support for the Open Science Coalition

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Five leading open science organisations – The Carpentries, OLS, rOpenSci, pyOpenSci, and PREreview – are seeking an external consultant or group to facilitate several activities over the second half of 2026. Selected consultants will continue the organisational alignment and collaboration work previously announced in late 2025.

This work has three strands:

Facilitation: co-ordinating between the five groups during the grant-writing period, possibly coordinating the grantwriter and governance facilitator as well.
Governance: Creating ways of working between the five organisations (Pitches by invitation only). This would occur during the grant-writing period and possibly after.
Grantwriting: to lead-author our multi-funder grant pitch. We expect that this grant will be pitched to multiple funders to co-fund, and may involve more than one phase, e.g. discovery phase, pilot phase, and implementation phase, over multiple years.

We would be willing to consider pitches that cover multiple roles at once.

From Surviving to Thriving: A Convening to Reclaim and Sustain Open Science Communities

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Open science has transformed how research is conducted, shared, and reused. Yet the organisations at the heart of this transformation are often left vulnerable, underfunded, and disconnected from one another. To move from simply surviving to truly thriving, five leading open science organisations—The Carpentries, OLS, rOpenSci, pyOpenSci, and PREreview—are convening to chart a collective path forward. We are so grateful to The Navigation Fund for supporting this work, and invite our communities to review the full proposal online.

Improving RStudio as a Teaching Tool

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Twitter, the RStudio support team requested suggestions for how to make RStudio better as a teaching tool. So I've started an issue on their support site for instructors to chime in with ideas. Go ahead and let them know what would make teaching with RStudio easier and better!

Funding Software Carpentry Workshops

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry workshops are taught by volunteers, but hosts need to fund instructor travel, accommodation as well as our administrative fees of $750-$1250. While these costs are low, it can sometimes be a challenge to get funding for your first workshop, especially if others are unfamiliar with SWC. Here are some successful strategies that hosts have used to fund workshops:

Managing GitHub Notifications

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

SWC has many GitHub repositories for lessons, websites, and workshops, and we have many conversations about our work take place through GitHub issue threads. Since GitHub creates e-mail notifications of repositories and issues you participate in, that means you can quickly start getting loads of e-mail.

While it's helpful to be kept abreast of developments on a project, if you get a flood of GitHub messages you won't see what's important. Here's a quick primer on fine-tuning your notifications so that you only see what you want, gleaned from this helpful conversation:

Ongoing Learning with User Groups

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

For the past two years I've run the UC Davis R User's Group (D-RUG). In this post, I'll (1) outline the structure of D-RUG, (2) summarize some lessons learned, and (3) discuss how such users' groups could act to support and complement SWC's workshops.