Feedback on The Carpentries

Teaching in Times of Crisis: Insights from CarpentryCon

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Hello Carpentries community! In this blog post, we will explore how educators can effectively teach during such difficult times, drawing insights from a virtual workshop at CarpentryCon we ran back in 2022. The challenges that Instructors are facing in 2025 are certainly different from those faced in 2022. Many of us were deeply concerned with the return to in-person activities following the pandemic-related closures. Others were embedded in discourse surrounding the 2022 presidential election in the United States. We also saw the initial outbreak of the present-day conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine.

We're Almost There: Share Your Input on The Carpentries' New Membership Model

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is evolving — and so is our membership program. To remain a strong, sustainable community of practice, we are finalising a new model that reflects today’s realities, tomorrow’s opportunities, and, most importantly, the needs of our community.

Last year, many of you shared your perspectives in our 2024 member survey. Your feedback was invaluable — it highlighted where our membership program could be more relevant, flexible, and supportive. That input has guided our redesign, and now we’re ready to take the next step.

Incentivising the Completion of Workshop Surveys: Tips for Instructors

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As all Carpentries Instructors probably know, it is very hard to get people to complete workshop surveys. It was time to find a solution, but what can we do to inspire folks to complete yet another boring survey. Despite all my promises to learners that we look at and consider all the comments and feedback we get, it has been a miracle every time we get more than 50 per cent of attendees to complete it. Giving people time, at the end of the lesson, to complete the survey helped a bit, but not much.

Changes to Software Carpentry's Lesson Program Governance Committee and their work

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hi all!

Like you all, we were surprised, upset, and a little taken aback by the loss of several members of the Carpentries Core Team. Our thoughts and best wishes are with all those who have been affected.

What does a reduction in Core Team support available mean for Software Carpentry Governance and the maintenance and development of lesson materials? These are the most difficult conversations we have had in the past year as the Lesson Program Governance Committee (LPGC).

Sharing the 2023 Community Survey Evaluation Report

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2023, The Carpentries launched a community survey to inform and prioritise our work and that of the Core Team so we can better serve the community. We asked community members to take 5 minutes to provide feedback on their experience as Carpentries community members, seeking feedback that will help us better understand the benefits community members get from their participation and inform areas of improvement.

We received 200 responses to the survey. It is difficult to identify a response rate without an exact count of the number of active community members. However, this represents 5% of The Carpentries Slack workspace members and 7% of those subscribed to Carpentries Clippings, our newsletter.

Carpentries Values Project - An Update and Call for Input

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When we set out to ask The Carpentries community for input on August 1, we spelled out the rationale of The Carpentries Values project in this way:

Shared values and goals have long been the starting point of communities of practice as they identify changes they want to see and start working together towards these changes. The Carpentries started out with a clear goal - teaching foundational computational skills to researchers worldwide. Something that is also important and unique about our community is how we work and engage with each other. As a community, values are important to us and we consider that we have a set of shared values. However, we have not yet articulated what these values are.

2019 Instructor Development Committee (IDC) Meeting Schedule

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Instructor Development Committee (IDC) would like to announce the schedule for this year’s meetings. They will be held on the third Monday of the month at 16:00 UTC and 22:00 UTC.

The June IDC meetings are on Monday June 17th at the above times. We will discuss our work on the Mentoring Program, as well as pitch and solicit ideas for what the committee should be doing in the future.

Help Shape the Governance of Our Community

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, the Executive Council announced an RFC for bylaws for The Carpentries. Bylaws traditionally describe the rules and regulations used to run an organization. As a fiscally sponsored organization, The Carpentries is not required to have formal (legally binding) bylaws. As an organization that is community-driven, though, these bylaws are important for describing the role of the community in governing and guiding the strategic direction of The Carpentries. We have tried to use plain language, rather than legal jargon, to make the document accessible for our diverse community members, while still attempting to provide clear expectations associated with the structure and governance of The Carpentries.

Request for Comment on Carpentries Mission and Vision

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As announced two weeks ago, the Executive Council has been working on developing drafts of the mission and vision statements for the new joint organization. These drafts are now available and we request your feedback through two Requests for Comment and related GitHub issues by midnight (in your time zone) Friday August 31, 2018.

Requests for Comment (RFCs, also called Requests for Public Comment) are a tool used to solicit feedback on planned actions that affect a broad community. These RFCs build on those used during the merging of Software and Data Carpentry to ensure that these central guiding statements serve all members of our diverse community.

The Carpentries' Virtual Listening Tour

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Carpentries Listens

“You Belong in The Carpentries”

The Carpentries is a community organisation, and we want to hear from our community.

As a part of developing Mission and Vision for The Carpentries, we, the staff and The Executive Council, are embarking on a virtual listening tour. Starting at CarpentryCon 2018 on May 30, 2018 and running until June 14, 2018, we’ll ask our community some short questions. You can respond via Twitter (Tweet to @thecarpentries) or, if you prefer to be anonymous, you can answer through a survey where you do not have to identify yourself.

Have your say

Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Belinda Weaver

The Library Carpentry governance group has created a governance repository on GitHub to list members, meeting minutes, and other things relevant to the future of Library Carpentry.

See the minutes of our May meeting.

The group meets monthly on the second Monday/Tuesday of the month (date and time depending on time zones).

Asking for your input

We want to deal with issues of relevance to this community. Feel free to suggest agenda items on our governance call etherpad.

State of the State: Carpentry Maintainers

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

All of the great work that we do as The Carpentries is dependent on the hard work and creativity of our community of volunteers. Each of you plays a vital role in helping us fulfill our mission of spreading data skills and computational literacy to researchers and other professionals worldwide. Within our Carpentry community, there are a number of subcommunities of like-minded folks carrying out particular aspects of the Carpentry mission. This blog post is the first in a series focusing on one of our sub-communities - the Maintainers.

Feedback on feedback

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

When I started as Community Development Lead, I posted a Google form to ask people in our community for feedback on what they thought was the main issue I should address.

I got a range of responses, from concerns about lesson maintenance to a call for more briefings to help people stay connected.

Also raised were instructor retention - how do we prevent burnout so good people don’t leave? - and instructor involvement - how do we increase the numbers of instructors reading our blog posts, signing up for the newsletter, getting involved in community calls and committees like mentoring?

Library Carpentry at the University of Sussex

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

Post by James Baker

Last Wednesday 14 Librarians from 8 libraries in the Brighton area convened at the Sussex Humanities Lab for a Library Carpentry workshop. The session was organised by the University of Sussex Library and colleagues from there were out in force both to instruct and as helpers. The workshop covered Regular Expressions, Shell, Git (in a short introductory session organised by local company Serano), and OpenRefine.

Teaching Library Carpentry at the New Librarians' Symposium

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

Post by Carmi Cronje

My colleague Fiona Jones and I recently taught a workshop called Introduction to the Library Carpentry Toolbox at the National Library Australia (NLA) for the ALIA New Librarians’ Symposium (NLS).

The New Librarians’ Symposium is held every two years - aimed at LIS and GLAMR students, managers, mentors, coders, hackers and more. This year’s was themed DIY Library Career, and held in Canberra 23rd-25th June. It was our first time at NLS so we weren’t sure what to expect, but it didn’t take long to get a sense of the positive environment outlined in their Inclusion Statement.

Community Call on Assessment

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Dr. Kari L. Jordan, Data Carpentry’s Deputy Director of Assessment, will be speaking on the Community Call on the impact our workshops have on our learners. Kari will cover the results of our post-workshop surveys including learner attitudes, learner data management and analysis skills prior to and following our workshops, and learner attitudes toward Data Carpentry instructors. Come and hear about our successes and share your thoughts. It’s going to be an informative community call.

Code of Conduct and Call for Volunteers for Policy Subcommittee

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are proud to share a common Code of Conduct (CoC), which outlines acceptable standards of behavior for our community members and those interacting with the Carpentries at in-person events and online spaces. Historically, however, we have not had an official process for reporting potential Code of Conduct violations or for adjudication and resolution of reported incidents. Thanks to input from our community, we recognise that defining these procedures is an important step in ensuring that any such issues are dealt with transparently in order to keep our community welcoming and safe for all.

Survey on workshops for for-profit organizations

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry’s vision is “building communities teaching universal data literacy”. All our activities are focused on working towards this vision.

One of our signature activities is running and teaching workshops. Except for two, we have so far run such workshops only for non-profit organizations - universities, non-government non-profits and government organizations. We have also been assessing the idea of running workshops for for-profit organizations. One goal would be to raise additional revenue to subsidize workshop fees at non-profit institutions and to support long-term sustainability for Data Carpentry. Another is to provide Data Carpentry training and perspectives to people conducting research in industry. We’re still evaluating this idea, and before making any long-term policy we wanted to run pilot workshops and survey the instructor community on their thoughts about workshops for for-profit organizations.

Data Carpentry to adopt Reproducible Research Curriculum

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Karen Cranston

Part of the mission of Data Carpentry is to encourage and enable reproducible research. The core Data Carpentry curriculum teaches researchers approaches and skills that are fundamental to reproducible research, such as scripting and data management. We are also adopting a Reproducible Research curriculum that explicitly focuses on reproducible techniques and some of the next steps, including version control and data publishing. This is an update on the efforts on this curriculum so far, and we expect to have it available soon as a Data Carpentry workshop option.

Wrapping Up in Melbourne

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Two long but useful days at Melbourne Uni have just wound down, and five dozen meteorologists and climate scientists have given us feedback on a well-run bootcamp:

Good

Bad

splitting big problems into small pieces
SQLite is easy
functions instead of loops
Python was easy
naming functions after pets
hands-on application at the same time as instructor
morning tea
dictionaries
explaining why, rather than just what
swapping variables
using our own computers
copy/paste onto Etherpad
arrays in NumPy
sticky notes
a bit of motivational speaking
location (I'm not from Melbourne, eh)
Subversion FTW!
Git + BitBucket
Python Notebook
hey, there's useful stuff online
helpers
red/green/refactor
really practical exampels of test-driven development
Greg tells stories
lot of participation
talk to other people during the breaks
regular expressions
cheap!
seeing how programmers think
realizing how much room for growth I have
scared in the first ten minutes...
the material is free
peer instruction

WiFi
didn't do any meteorological data sets
the jokes
viewing angle
installing stuff
couldn't use some advanced stuff (I'm a beginner)
coffee
running right after conference
squeezing four half days into two full days (maybe try 3?)
not enough exercises
not long enough
content could have been more focused
didn't do NetCDF files
a bit of motivational speaking
didn't see comparison of Python with R
lot of spread of material/ability
longer breaks (I'm so tired)
databases irrelevant to me
IPython/NumPy confusing
wasn't in New Zealand
not enough time on version control
wasn't in Fiji
hated SQL
Greg speaks waaaaaaaaay too fast
learned a lot about Vi
hopping
pretty intense, dude
took a long time to restart after breaks
more on plotting
lighting in the room is uneven
more about linking Python to other things
...after first ten minutes, it was OK

UBC Went Well

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Ted Hart and Ethan White just wrapped up a bootcamp at the University of British Columbia, and by all accounts it went very well:

Good

Bad

learn terminal
explanations are clear
SQLite is awesome
learn some Python
following along on screen
enthusiasm
content was relevant
practical software
SQLite is very helpful in data management
Etherpad
SQLite
SQLite: could use it tomorrow
like lots of problems with partners
iPython & SQLite
liked different levels as beginner so could get help
Etherpad ++ for collaborative note taking
current & up to date
Git
helpers and red light green light
pace was good
great intro to lots of methods (handled volume of info well)
free and open source software
good overview of things to improve workflow
collaborative notetaking and chating and small problems
Git from the command line (Linux guy)
Git & SQL, can use and share now
hands on problems well balanced with learning
good job balancing info and level variation

better examples of why Python is cool
disecting existing code
want to be inspired by an example of something cool
but not far enough to implement (longer)
cool projects
cheat sheets
brief one line explanation of everything before class & tailored workshops to specific disciplines
too hard to keep up
installation is much more difficult than R
fewer things so that we can actually use it
new to programming more exercises
not as clear how to use shell so less useful
shell: examples of why we should care, e.g., working across files
need to know more about iPython
lot of information, too much at times (fun stuff was at end)
didn't get to interconnecting the pieces (collaborative Git project) [group repo to play with]
group by OS or other similar interests
would have like to use Git from terminal
where are things coming from and going to
iPython notebook disconnected from scripting workflow
wanted SQL to R/Python (would have come back for another)
more time to integrate everything
why Python: spend a few minutes explaining why we chose it and what the alternatives are
expected it to be more advanced and focused on integration (more info)
"here's what you're going to learn" at beginning
not far enough in Python to know where to go next
some of the one and one help would have been good to share with the group
more difficult problems more collaboratively

Macquarie Went Well

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week's bootcamp at Macquarie University went well: I fumbled the introduction to Python on Friday morning (which I haven't done in a long time), but with a bit of help from Eli Bressert and great crew of helpers, we got the afternoon back on track. Here's the usual good vs. bad feedback:

Good

Bad

Understanding the syntax of Python
The stories
The flow of material
Cygwin
Linking programming to thinking
Understanding size of manageable tasks
Version control
Sticky notes
Embedding provenance in files
Database concepts
Learning good work habits
Coding with loops
Free!
Let people make mistakes and then correcting
Interactive nature of the learning experience
I got to show my work to real human beings!

Installation
The stories
Python introduction (Greg screwed up)
Some programs don't work on some people's computers
Air conditioning
Struggling to switch between languages
Bit more practice with coding
Python in Cygwin sucks
"You should only work eight hours a day" — yeah, right
Not enough on databases
Couldn't see the screen
Discovering R isn't as good as I thought it was
Not having enough examples

Software Carpentry Screencasts

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Chris Lasher, who audited the Software Carpentry course long-distance last time around, has put together some screencasts to go with the first few lectures:

The shell (screencast)
Subversion (screencast)

I think this is very cool — if you have feedback, or want to praise him (hint, hint), please drop him a line. I would also be interested in hearing how useful you find these — if there were twenty or thirty covering the whole course, would you actually watch them? And would they help you understand the course material?

Database Lecture is Up

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The lecture on databases (actually an introduction to SQL) is now up. Comments and corrections welcome.