Maintainers on The Carpentries

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula, including our newest Lesson Program, HPC Carpentry. Seventeen new Maintainers participated in the two hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance.
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community.
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors.
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template.
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

In addition to the onboarding sessions, Maintainers are eligible to join one of our upcoming GitHub for Maintainers and Lesson Developers professional development courses, equipping them with the skills they need to maintain an open source project effectively.

Stories from The Carpentries Community: Why Skill-Building, Teaching, and Community Matter for Open Science

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Community Teaching Data Skills for Open Science

The Carpentries is a global community dedicated to teaching foundational data and computational skills for research and professional practice. Our programs help people work more effectively with data, code, and software while supporting open, reproducible science.

Today, the community includes:

5,405 certified Instructors
185 Instructor Trainers
4,965 workshops taught in 72 countries

But these numbers only tell part of the story.

The real impact of The Carpentries comes from the people who teach, learn, and collaborate through our programs. Through our Partnership program, organisations join a global network focused on building local capacity for teaching data skills.

Our People, Our Impact: How The Carpentries Community Multiplies Skills Worldwide

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our People, Our Impact

The impact of The Carpentries has always been rooted in people.

Across universities, research institutes, libraries, and organisations around the world, community members are working together to build capacity for teaching foundational data and computational skills. At the center of this work are the people who teach, maintain, and build community around the programs that make our workshops possible. They then go on to introduce The Carpentries to other individuals at their institutions and empower them with the same skills. This is where the multiplier effect begins - one of the main benefits of an institutional Partnership with the Carpentries.

Join the 2026 Maintainer Onboarding Cohort!

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next cohort of Maintainers. We are delighted that 79 of 112 existing Maintainers have chosen to continue in their role for another year. To keep the community healthy and ensure that all lessons are well supported, we are calling for volunteers to step into the role.

This year, we are also onboarding Maintainers for our newest Lesson Program, HPC Carpentry, for the first time. Read on for details!

Please Update Your AMY Profile!

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have recently released some updates on AMY, our community data management software. We are calling on our Instructors, Instructor Trainers, Maintainers, and all other Carpentries community members with a profile on AMY to please take a few minutes to update your airport location and any other outdated information on your AMY profile.

Active Carpentries community members can log in to AMY via GitHub. The AMY Community User Guide provides step-by-step instructions for logging in to AMY and updating your profile.

Join Us in Welcoming Jose Niño Muriel as Our New Maintainer Community Lead!

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone,

My name is Jose Niño Muriel, and I’m thrilled to introduce myself as your new Maintainer Community Lead, continuing the great work Nathaniel Porter has done over the past few years.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been deeply involved with Carpentries-related activities in my role as Data Science Community Lead at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library (UCSB). There, you can usually find me organising and teaching workshops, and supporting our wonderful community of helpers and Instructors in Carpentry @ UCSB.

Final Update from Outgoing Maintainer Community Lead, Nathaniel Porter

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

For the past 2 years, I have had the privilege of serving The Carpentries as Maintainer Community Lead, a role that has continued to develop and become central to the Carpentries community over the last six years as Angela, Daniel, Vini, and now me have explored what it can be. At the end of September, I am leaving the role to focus on other goals (like fully launching Open Qualitative Research with Taguette and QualCoder Library Carpentry lessons), and so, in keeping with tradition, I get to share one final blog post about my experience.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Thirty new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance.
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community.
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors.
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template.
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintenance.
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, along with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months.

Join the 2025 Maintainer Onboarding Cohort!

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next cohort of Maintainers. We are delighted that 83 of 111 current Maintainers have chosen to continue in their role for another year, meaning that our need to onboard new Maintainers is not as urgent as it has been in previous years. Nevertheless, to keep the community healthy and ensure that all lessons are well supported, we are calling for volunteers to step into the role.

The Carpentries’ Handbooks Relaunched!

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today, 9 December 2024, we relaunched The Carpentries Handbooks! The Handbooks are compiled for the following community roles: Community Session Hosts, Curriculum Advisors, Instructors, Instructor Trainers, Lesson Developers, Lesson Program Governors, and Maintainers. Each Handbook provides detailed information for our volunteer community members to fulfill the duties of each role, and includes steps to follow when onboarding onto and offboarding from the role, the responsibilities and duties for each role, as well as a list of resources available to members to fulfill those responsibilities.

Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee Approves a Major Update to the LC Python Lesson

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We are excited to announce that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) has approved a major update to the Python Intro for Libraries lesson.

The lesson demonstrates how to use Python to clean, analyse, and visualise library usage data, providing an introduction to reproducible workflows in Python for library and information workers. While the lesson repurposes some elements from the previous Library Carpentry Introduction to Python, it is a major overhaul that includes a new library-specific dataset, the use of JupyterLab instead of Spyder, and new episodes that use Pandas to tidy a dataset and Plotly to visualise data.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. 26 new Maintainers participated in the two hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintanence
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

New and existing Maintainers were also invited to join a two hour GitHub Skill-up, aiming to teach them how to:

Library Carpentry Curriculum Committee Approves Data Management Plan Lesson

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We are excited to announce that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) has approved a new lesson Data Management Plan Course for Librarians for inclusion in the Library Carpentry curriculum. This course was developed as part of an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to UCLA to develop open science lessons for Library Carpentry.

This course provides an introduction to conducting data management plan (DMP) services for librarians. By the end of this course, librarians should be equipped to offer basic DMP review services to researchers.

Advancing AI Education in GLAM: Highlights from the Library Carpentry Code Sprint

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The lesson maintainers for Intro to AI for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (the LC-CAC) co-hosted a seven-hour online code sprint on Jan 31, 2024 to help contribute bug fixes, edits, and improvements to this popular new lesson.

With the aim of moving the beta lesson closer to a stable release and adding it to the core Library Carpentry curriculum, a diverse group of global participants gathered to work on the lesson. Fourteen participants with a range of affiliations and expertise collaborated together during shifts that were hosted throughout the Sprint by Phil Reed, Cody Hennesy, Tim Dennis, and Leigh Phan. Participants included representatives from Hugging Face (UK), the University of Manchester (UK), the Medical Research Council at the Gambia Unit at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg (DE), The National Archives (UK), the University of California, Los Angeles (US), the University of Minnesota (US), and the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Apply for 2024 Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next round of Maintainers. Currently we have 92 Maintainers serving across 48 core lessons. To keep the community healthy, we need to plan for people wanting to step down from their current positions and finding new people to step into the role.

You do not need to be a Git expert to be a Maintainer. If you are familiar with the current Carpentries Git materials, you will have the foundation and support to learn the skills you will need as a Maintainer. Training on lesson maintenance workflows and GitHub skill up sessions will be offered in multiple time zones during onboarding to ensure you have the skills you need to succeed.

Join us in welcoming Nathaniel Porter as our new Maintainer Community Lead!

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Carpentries community!

My name is Nathaniel and I’m excited to be taking on a new role with The Carpentries as Maintainer Community Lead. I’d say it’s a new hat for me, but if you’ve seen me on a call or workshop around the Carpentries, you’ll probably recognize me more by my flat cap (which I don’t intend to replace) than my face.

Maintainer Community Lead: an update and next steps

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My Time as Maintainer Community Lead - a message from Vini Salazer

The Maintainer Community Lead is a volunteer position at The Carpentries with the main goal of supporting Lesson Maintainers. I took up this role last year following the departure of Daniel Chen. Daniel did some amazing work, not only supporting the Maintainer Community, but also revamping the Maintainer Onboarding curriculum and the Maintainer Request for Comments (RFCs), a space for discussion lesson changes and the Maintainer Community in general.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am thrilled to share the news that our latest cohort of Lesson Maintainers has completed their onboarding and are now poised to provide valuable support across The Carpentries curricula. Nineteen individuals participated in the comprehensive three-hour onboarding program, which included a wide range of goals and objectives. These included gaining a better understanding of The Carpentries’ vision and goals for lesson maintenance, connecting with other Maintainers and the larger Maintainer community, and developing the necessary skills to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for all contributors. Additionally, participants gained valuable hands-on experience with core technical skills for lesson maintenance.

Apply for the current round of Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next cohort of Maintainers. Currently we have 109 Maintainers serving across 56 core lessons. To keep the community healthy, we need to plan for offboarding people who want to step down from their current positions and finding new people to step into the role.

You do not need to be a Git expert to be a Maintainer. If you are familiar with the Git lessons from either Library Carpentry or Software Carpentry, you will have the foundation and support to learn the skills you will need as a Maintainer. The Maintainer community has a dedicated Slack channel, TopicBox list, and two monthly meetings to help support you and the lesson you are working on.

Join us in Welcoming our New Maintainers!

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Seven new Maintainers completed independent study of the Maintainer onboarding curriculum, and demonstrated completion of the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintenance
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Thirty new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintenance.
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community.
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors.
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template.
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintenance.
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, and continuing to work with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months. If you are interested in becoming a Maintainer in the future, stay tuned for announcements of our yearly Maintainer Onboarding sessions.

Join us in welcoming Vini Salazar as our new Maintainer Community Lead!

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

My name is Vini and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining The Carpentries as Maintainer Community Lead. It’s a pleasure to assume this role passed on from Daniel Chen, which did a wonderful job for the past year and a half. The Maintainer Community Lead is a point of contact for all things related to maintenance of Carpentries lessons. I’ll also be hosting the monthly Maintainer Meetings that serve as a space to discuss that. You are welcome to ask any technical questions related to Git, GitHub, interacting with contributors or anything of the sort. Maintainers are a vital part of The Carpentries community, and we understand that being one requires a fair amount of time and commitment. So, we hope to support not only current Maintainers, but also to facilitate the process for people that would like to either step down from or return to their Maintainer role. I’m also very excited for this year’s round of Maintainer Onboarding, which is happening this week! Looking forward to meeting all of you joining. An important note: due to time zone differences, starting from June the monthly Maintainer Meetings will change times to 12 and 22 UTC. For meeting times, you can always check the Maintainers’ CodiMD.

Community Maintainer Lead: Recap, Update, and What's Next

Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Community Maintainer Lead

The Community Maintainer Lead is a volunteer position at The Carpentries with the main goal of supporting the lesson Maintainers. Angela Li was the first to have this role, where she worked on the Lesson Maintenance Handbook to help give new and existing maintainers more guidance on how to Maintain a lesson. When I took on the role after Angela, I wanted to help build the Maintainer community within and between individual lessons.

Apply for the current round of Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard a new cohort of Maintainers! We currently have 72 Maintainers serving across 48 official lessons. To maintain healthy support for all of our lessons, and to enable Maintainers to step back from the role as needed, we are recruiting an additional 52 Maintainers for 29 lessons. Although we are not yet able to hold Maintainer Onboarding in languages other than English, we strongly encourage applications from folks interested in maintaining one of the four official Carpentries lessons currently offered in Spanish.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Eighteen new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, using a completely updated curriculum with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintanence
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintanence
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

Reflecting on our first Alpha Test of the Lesson Infrastructure Redesign

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This is an ongoing series of blog posts about the next iteration of the [Lesson Infrastructure]({{ site.url }}/posts-by-tags/#lesson-infrastructure). Find more about our Design Principles and our Path to the Design for the Lesson Website

As our community has grown in the past few years, it has become evident that our current lesson infrastructure—where implementing updates involves complex manual steps—does not scale well. It was also evident that the lesson development toolchain was intimidating enough that it was—in and of itself—a barrier to contribution. When this infrastructure was created back in 2016, we had only a few lessons that were maintained by a small group of maintainers who were able to install the toolchain and render them locally. We now have more than 100 official and community-developed lessons combined. Based on the feedback from our much larger maintainer community, it is clear that many find it challenging to keep the infrastructure up-to-date on their own machines.

Apply for the current round of Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next round of Maintainers. Currently we have 161 Maintainers serving across 54 core lessons. To keep the community healthy, we need to plan for people wanting to step down from their current positions and finding new people to step into the role.

Most of our official core lessons are currently in maintenance mode - meaning that the content is relatively stable. However, we are planning to move to a new lesson template and a new infrastructure stack for building the lessons. Over the next year, there will be a bit more work making sure all existing issues and PRs are dealt with as the lesson transition over to the new template and infrastructure stack.

Thank You SO MUCH Carpentries Community!

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The image above is a composite of our Core Team’s photos - from left to right,
first row : Zhian, Talisha, Sher!, Angelique, Kelly, Karen, Toby
second row: Serah, Omar, Maneesha, Kari, Erin, François

TL;DR

What a year! As we come to the close of 2020, in all our reflection and retrospectives and reporting and winding-down and planning for 2021 - the most accurate sentiment to sum up how we feel about our community in THANK YOU. There is so much we can collectively say as a team, in fact, we started to co-author our thank you notes to all of you, and seven pages into our collaborative document, we still have more to say, and the wise words of many of you at the back of our minds - short and succinct, that is how all Carpentries posts should be!

Announcing our new Maintainer Community Lead

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! I am excited to be joining The Carpentries as the next Maintainer Community Lead. The previous lead, Angela Li, has left me some large shoes to fill, in building and sustaining the Maintainer community, and I hope to build on what she has already created.

I joined Software Carpentry in 2014. Since then, I have maintained lessons and have taught numerous workshops, and just finished up my Carpentries Trainer Training. I am currently a PhD Student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the eastern United States, looking at data science education in the biomedical sciences, where my work is heavily inspired by The Carpentries.

Building the Maintainer Community and Your Own Skillset

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past nine months, I have had the pleasure of serving as The Carpentries first Maintainer Community Lead. What started as a way to negotiate a Platinum Membership for my institution quickly became a way to get plugged into a large community of lesson maintainers, support others as they learned to maintain and support our curriculum materials, and multiply my impact in the community by empowering others to take the lead on our curricula.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed their onboarding and received their badges! We had over 30 individuals participate in Maintainer Onboarding over the past month, including 8 existing Maintainers. We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, and continuing to work with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months. We’d first like to thank several continuing Maintainers who participated in the onboarding. The insights and experience these folks were able to bring to the discussions were invaluable. Thank you Maxim Belkin, Sarah Stevens, Kat Koziar, Clarke Iakovakis, and Shari Laster!

Being a Carpentries Maintainer and the Skills You Can Learn

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post about “What the Carpentries Mean To Me” and it traced how everything I know these days stems from my first SWC workshop in 2013. I still hold the same sentiment today.

In the past few years, one of the biggest skills I have become more fluent in is Git version control and collaboration. As a part of Carpentry instructor onboarding, we are asked to submit a Pull Request to an existing lesson. This serves as a litmus test to make sure things are working and you’ve gone through the collaboration process at least once (nobody is expecting a full understanding of Git). But, maintainers do need to be somewhat comfortable with Git.

Apply for Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for anyone interested in becoming a Carpentries Lesson Maintainer!

Maintainers sustain our lessons and curricula over the long run, and we are looking forward to bringing on a new cohort of Maintainers to support our lessons. Additionally, we are opening up Maintainer Onboarding to existing Maintainers who wish to further advance their skills to better serve their lessons.

Our goals are to support Maintainers with training to successfully manage their lessons. Additionally, we hope to better serve those who contribute to lessons by encouraging timely response to their contributions. Finally, we hope to build out the Maintainer community through more regular onboarding.

Announcing our new Maintainer Community Lead

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Angela Li is now serving as Maintainer Community Lead. Angela’s work in this role is supported by her home institution, the University of Chicago. She will be helping to reboot our Maintainer Onboarding program, recruit and onboard new Maintainers, and develop a sustainable way to support our Maintainer community.

Maintainers are a key part of The Carpentries community, acting as the backbone that supports our open-source curriculum and keeps our many lessons healthy. We’re looking forward to having Angela on board to support the Maintainer community in their lesson development and maintenance role. Welcome to the team, Angela!

We Appreciate Lesson Maintainers!

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We would like to sincerely thank the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lesson Maintainers for their behind-the-scenes work that makes all of our workshops and independent learning possible.

Across our three Lesson Programs, we have 111 Maintainers, who work in teams to evaluate, respond to, and incorporate feedback and suggestions for improvement from workshop Instructors, helpers, learners, and folks who are using our lessons for independent learning. Our 111 Lesson Maintainers support our 51 official Carpentries lessons and workshop overview pages, and help provide feedback on our lesson template to guide its development.

What have the Library Carpentry Maintainers been working on?

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

In January 2019, the Library Carpentry Maintainers met online to discuss a variety of topics from communication channels to giving credit. The discussions helped with tackling big questions and understanding how we wanted to work as Maintainers.

See News from the Library Carpentry Maintainer Community and Curriculum Advisory Committee

What have the Maintainers been up to since then? This blog post will catch you up on what all the lesson Maintainer teams have been doing since January. The following are brief reports from the lesson Maintainer groups: