Workbench on The Carpentries

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.

The 2023 Instructor Notes Drive Starts Next Week!

Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 2023 Instructor Notes Drive will take place from 8th to 19th May. During these two weeks, we call on the community to help us expand, update, and improve the guidance provided to Instructors on Carpentries lessons. It is a great opportunity to make an impact on the effectiveness of Carpentries lessons, to learn more about how to contribute to lessons, and to practice and develop your skills working with Markdown, Git, and GitHub.

Get Ready for the Instructor Notes Drive

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From 8-19th May, we will be coordinating an Instructor Notes Drive: a community-wide effort to update, expand, and improve guidance provided to Instructors in lessons.

What are Instructor Notes?

Instructor Notes are pieces of advice, guidance, warnings, resources, etc for those teaching a lesson, to help them prepare and teach their workshops more effectively. Until now, Instructor Notes have been kept in a dedicated page, located under the “Extras” dropdown menu of a lesson site.

Developing Support for Instructors in 2023

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, we outline some of the activities the Core Team has planned to make the lives of Instructors easier in 2023.

Developing Instructor onboarding materials

The Workshop Administration Team is working with the Instructor Training Team and the Community Development Team to develop a general Instructor Onboarding. These onboarding events are intended to help prepare Instructors to teach their first workshops. During Instructor Training there is a plethora of information being shared and after certification the Instructors may still have questions directly related to workshop logistics. Updates to the development and launch of the Instructor Onboarding will become available as progress is made.