Software Carpentry Needs You!

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry needs you! If you found our workshops, tutorials, or online material useful, there are many ways you could help us grow:

Send us a testimonial to add to this page, or write a longer one that we can post on our blog. (We show these to potential sponsors as evidence that we're doing good things, and to people who are thinking about organizing or attending workshops to give them an idea of the benefits.)

Help organize and host a two-day workshop. All we need is a room big enough to hold 30-100 people, a reliable network, coffee, and travel expenses for a couple of instructors (who can usually give academic talks while they're in town as well). Based on the last six months, workshops work best when they're aimed at people from the same labs, departments, or disciplines, so we're also interested in running workshops in conjunction with conferences and other get-togethers of like-minded people.

Help us teach! It's the best way to learn, and we can also give you a chance to learn how to deliver online tutorials (which is a pretty useful bullet point to have on your resume these days if you're thinking about an academic career). If you're interested, we'll get you to help out at a workshop or two, then co-teach with a more experienced instructor until you're ready to fly solo.

Help us update our content. Some of our lectures have bugs in them, while others make less sense to novices than we thought they would when we created them, and there are always new things to add.

Help run things. We have maps and mailing lists to update, workshop ads to write and publish, questions to answer, and a web site to update. You don't need mad hacking skills to do any of these things, but we do ask that anyone who takes this on commits to doing a couple of hours a week for at least 3-4 months at a stretch to amortize the training overhead.

Write software! This post is probably more than you want to bite off, but there are lots of other things you could help build that would help us. It would be a great way to build your reputation, too.

Do something we haven't thought of. If you can think of a way to help us that we haven't thought of ourselves, please let us know.

Like every open source project, Software Carpentry will only thrive if people like you lend a hand. If you'd like to help out, please get in touch.