Maintainer Community Lead: an update and next steps

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.

My work as Maintainer Community Lead involved hosting the monthly Maintainer Meetings, supporting this year’s round of Maintainer onboarding, and being a contact point between the Maintainer community and The Carpentries’ Core Team. I was very glad to be continuously interacting with Maintainers and learned heaps from many interesting questions and discussion points that came up during the meetings and Onboarding. This past year, The Carpentries went through an important transition of changing the infrastructure used for the lessons, to a new framework called The Workbench. This was a monumental effort by the Core Team, which affected all of the lessons and required much cooperation from the Maintainer community. I commend both The Carpentries’ Core Team and the Maintainer community for working through this, and I believe that using The Workbench will provide a much-improved experience for the whole Carpentries community for years to come.

My tenure in this role is the second project that I have been involved with in collaboration with The Carpentries, the first one being the Python Curriculum Project in 2021. I can sincerely say that working with this community is always so rewarding. I am grateful for my time as Maintainer Community Lead, and for the very generous institutional membership that was provided by The Carpentries in return. Because of it, my university was able to run two workshops with full attendance, and we have had colleagues undertake The Carpentries Instructor Training.

As I am nearing the end of my PhD program, it is time to step down from my volunteership. I will remain a Carpentries Maintainer, and continue to participate in the community. A warm thank you to The Carpentries and, especially, to the Maintainer community.

Now It’s Your Turn - a message from Erin Becker

It is with a huge amount of gratitude that I thank Vini for his service as Maintainer Community Lead over the past year and wish him every success in the rest of his academic journey! With this transition, we are now seeking a new volunteer (or two!) to serve as Maintainer Community Lead(s). Although this role has previously been filled by a single individual, we’d like to explore the possibility of sharing the responsibilities between a team moving forward, given the geographically dispersed nature of the Maintainer community.

Responsibilities of the Maintainer Community Lead include leading monthly Maintainer meetings, recruiting for and assisting with teaching Maintainer onboarding, responding to Maintainer inquiries, and having short check-ins with me about twice a month. There is potential for the scope of the role to be broadened, and the Curriculum Team would be very keen to discuss your ideas about how this role can best serve our Maintainer Community.

Because this is a significant time commitment, there is an opportunity to formalize this role through a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with your employer to ensure your time in this role is recognized by your organisation and to provide the organisation with a Membership in return for supporting you in this work.

Please reach out to Erin Becker at ebecker@carpentries.org by 21 September 2023, midnight anywhere on earth if becoming the new Maintainer Community Lead is of interest to you! Please also feel free to reach out to Erin via Slack with any questions you have.