Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Partner to Support The Carpentries

We are generating vast amounts of data, but it is not the data itself that is valuable—it is the information and knowledge that can come from this data. However, we are limited in translating this sea of data into discovery and solutions, because we have a limited set of diverse groups of people with the skills, perspective, and access to work effectively with data. We need to bring people to data—rather than just bringing data to compute or compute to data—and empower them to address their questions, reach their potential, and solve issues that are important in science, scholarship, and society.

In the last 5 years, with instructor training, volunteer instructors and collaboratively developed open-source curricula, our community has taught more than 2,290 workshops, training over 50,000 learners on 7 continents! We have more than 45 active lessons with more than 1100 people who have collaboratively contributed to their development. At an institutional level, we have more than 80 Member Organisations that host workshops, train instructors and are building communities of practice around digital skills at their institutions. People contribute to community development, help at workshops, update documentation and collaborate in so many other ways. Our community is always learning and growing and looking for new opportunities to reach more people and work towards our vision to be the leading inclusive community teaching computing and data skills.

The Carpentries global reach and impact(November 2019)

$2.65 Million In Support Over Three Years from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

We are excited to announce that we have received new funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). The funding of $2.65 million over 3 years will be used to better sustain and scale existing programs such as instructor training, build new capacity to support local communities, enable community-contributed curriculum development and improve the accessibility of our materials. As we have expanded into new regions, building community and local capacity for training has become a core part of The Carpentries’ programs. Through instructor, Member Organisation and community feedback, we have heard that to be more effective and supportive, we need to prioritise capacity building in our Trainers program, support more community-contributed curriculum development and support the development of local communities. We therefore are thrilled to have this opportunity to do this work.

Here is what we will be doing with this support:

Scaling and sustaining The Carpentries Trainer Development program (CZI, 3 years)

Our instructor training is the foundation of our program, but as we have grown, we have been limited by the capacity of our Trainers program. We also recognise that instructor training skills are valuable and being used for teaching many types of computational content, not just Carpentries lessons. We need to further develop our Trainer program to provide consistent, ongoing Trainer training opportunities that can help build communities in new regions and domains. We will create an openly licensed Trainer curriculum, improve support for new Trainers, continue to update and maintain our Instructor Training curriculum and develop assessment for our instructor training program to evaluate its impact for teaching computational skills.

CarpentriesLabs: A platform for community creation, sharing and dissemination of open source curriculum (CZI, 1.5 years)

The model of collaborative curriculum development has only become more important and relevant as the need for training in specific tools and different types of content expands. We’ve already seen the interest in this from Member Organisations and the engagement in Carpentries Incubator. We will build and facilitate content for CarpentriesLabs, a platform for sharing high-quality open source curricula and creating the general infrastructure, documentation and community engagement pathways for people to contribute curricula to a shared repository for dissemination and discovery.

Creation of accessible resources to meet the needs and broaden engagement of The Carpentries’ diverse community (Moore, 2 years)

An increase in The Carpentries’ activities has resulted in a larger and more diverse community of practice. This funding will allow us to make more progress on our Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Roadmap. We will update existing resources to make them more accessible and approachable through accessibility guidelines and taking a human-centred design approach. Additionally, we will focus on responsive community engagement practices across all platforms where these communities converge, with an aim to communicate effectively and connect community members with each other.

Development of local community support and leadership (Moore, 2 years)

The Carpentries has grown and we now have many local and regional communities of instructors. They are looking to coordinate activities at their local sites, connect with each other and reach learners in different ways. We will develop and provide community resources and programs to guide community leaders in leading and sustaining these communities, support them in their work, and connect them with each other.

Develop curricula for EukRef and UniEuk and eukaryotic genome analysis (Moore, 2 years)

Training and curriculum is an effective way to onboard people to learn new approaches and engage with existing tools and resources. We will work with the EukRef and UniEuk communities and those working on complex eukaryotic genome analysis to develop accessible and relevant curricula around these workflows and tools.

This funding from the Moore Foundation and CZI will allow us to commission work for Instructor Training, CarpentriesLabs development, community building and communications. Look out for opportunities on our website soon!

About our Funding Sources

We aim to be transparent in our sources of revenue and how they align with our vision and values, and funding must support existing priorities. See more about support for The Carpentries.

This grant continues our relationship with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Our project has received funding from the Moore Foundation for Data Carpentry and for CarpentryCon 2018 through their Data Driven Discovery program. This is new funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that complements their commitment to open science. We are grateful to these organisations for their support.

We would also like to thank our amazing community of contributors and volunteers, without whom none of this would be possible.