Grant from the Moore Foundation

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are extremely pleased to announce that Data Carpentry has received $750,000 in funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

With more than $6.4 billion in assets, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is the ninth largest foundation in the United States. The Science Program accounts for approximately 40 percent of the foundation’s annual grant making, making the foundation one of the largest private funders of science nationwide.

Data Carpentry is fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We develop and provide training to researchers in fundamental data skills to enable more effective and efficient research progress.

This grant will help support the project for two years. It will allow us to grow our core team, establish better infrastructure, work with the volunteer community to develop content, conduct more workshops in more scientific domains and plan for sustainability.

The text of our grant proposal is available on Figshare.

We are particularly excited to work with the Moore Foundation with whom we share a mission of enabling data-driven discovery. Our focus is providing training that will help engage a larger population of scientists in tackling data-driven challenges. Although petabytes of data are now available, the missing step between data collection and research progress is a lack of training for scientists in crucial skills for effectively managing and analyzing large amounts of data.

Our goal is to provide researchers high-quality, domain-specific training covering the full life cycle of data-driven research. The focus of our activities on this grant will be:

Expanding into new domains - We will develop lesson content in new domains, particularly in the life sciences and physical sciences.

Train thousands of scientists: We will run regular workshops at universities and research organizations, teaching scientists the skills they need to conduct research using large scale data.

Scale our instructor pool: Teaching Data Carpentry to thousands of scientists, across an array of domains, will require us to significantly expand the pool of high quality instructors. In collaboration with Software Carpentry, we will train instructors in both evidence-based teaching practices and the specifics of teaching and delivering Data Carpentry workshops. This includes fostering and supporting the community of instructors through a friendly, open, and diverse online community.

Develop strategies for delivering workshops online As part of efforts to scale up training, we will also work to develop approaches to delivering workshops online that include active participation and real-time feedback and assistance from instructors.

The success of Data Carpentry is the result of the amazing community that has worked as instructors, content developers, workshop hosts, learners and supporters, and we can’t thank you enough for your contributions. We look forward to the opportunity to continue to empower researchers and enable research. We have more information and posts coming soon on how to be involved as an instructor, in developing content or hosting workshops, so stay posted!