Changes to support from the Core Team at The Carpentries

Yesterday, we released a blog post re-introducing to the community the nine members of The Carpentries Core Team. This comes after we recently announced the departure of seven valued members of The Carpentries Core Team and celebrated the accomplishments, heart, and vision of our legacy team members. The financial necessity of these recent changes also requires us to look closely at our workload. We must determine which of the many activities supported by our Core Team lie at the heart of The Carpentries vision to be the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills.

In this blog post, we clarify how our Core Team will continue to support the community, which initiatives will continue through community-led support, and which activities will be sunset. All of the choices below have been made carefully. We are confident that they will allow the Core Team to continue its involvement everywhere it is needed most.

Our strength comes from our community members. We thank you for your support and encourage all community members to continue giving time and energy to Carpentries activities that bring you joy and meet the strong desire to give back to this community that many of you have expressed.

Workshops and Training

SherAaron Hurt, our Director of Workshops and Training, will lead our combined Workshops and Instruction Team. Sher will work closely with Dr. Angelique Trusler, our Community Manager, who will support workshops in Africa and Europe, and with Danielle Sieh, our Workshops and Training Manager, who will support workshops in the Americas, Asia, and Australasia. You will notice more Core Team representation at your workshops! Most members of the Core Team will now be teaching once a month to better complement the availability of our volunteer Instructor community. We excitedly await interacting more with our Instructors, learners, and workshop hosts.

With the support of our committed volunteer Trainers, we will continue offering Instructor Training on a rolling calendar to Member organisations and individuals who have purchased seats. We will discontinue our Open Instructor Training program - this program was initiated in 2016 to offer training to 60 individuals. We have since trained 1,330 people through this program! Individuals recently accepted into Open Instructor Training can enroll in any upcoming event and will not lose their accepted status.

Our Instructors will continue to network regularly, share teaching experiences, ask questions, and learn about updates that will impact them, but the frequency of Instructor meetings will decrease from monthly to alternate months. Our Trainer community will continue to meet monthly and be supported by the Trainers Leadership Committee. We plan to recruit a new cohort of community members to become Trainers in the coming months. Trainer Training seats will be available to Member organisations and the general community.

If you have questions about Workshops, Instructor Training, or Trainer Training, please contact team@carpentries.org or Sher! directly at sheraaron@carpentries.org.

Membership

In mid-2024, we plan to increase the flexibility of our membership structure to give Members more freedom to build a membership package with the right number of Instructor Training seats and Centrally Organised Workshops to support their local programming. We also plan to incorporate our newest program, Collaborative Lesson Development Training, into our membership model so that continuing and future Members can include it in their membership packages.

We are discontinuing quarterly Member Council meetings. We will achieve the intended goals of those meetings (e.g., program updates) through our quarterly newsletter. Members will continue receiving individual updates about their benefit usage and the progress of their Instructor trainees toward certification. Additionally, Members are encouraged to schedule a call with our team if they need additional support. They will be invited to quarterly Community Development Program calls to engage in capacity-building conversations. We remain committed to helping Member organisations build capacity at their institutions and hearing from our Member Council about matters impacting the organisation globally.

We are also discontinuing our financially-supported membership option, which had previously provided a percentage discount on membership packages for organisations with financial needs. Since it was initiated in 2022, we have provided USD 46,912 in sponsored membership benefits through this program. Moving forward, we are investigating pathways to allow Members to donate unused benefits to other organisations. We will continue to offer tiered pricing for all of our services to make them more accessible to institutions in the Global South.

If you have any questions about Membership, please contact membership@carpentries.org.

Curriculum

Dr. Toby Hodges, our Director of Curriculum, will continue leading the Curriculum Team, supported by Dr. Erin Becker, our Associate Director. We will continue to meet regularly with Maintainers to support the ongoing upkeep of The Carpentries core curricula. The Maintainer community will be further supported by Dr. Nathaniel Porter, our Maintainer Community Lead, who will coordinate monthly meetings and annual recruitment and onboarding of new Maintainers.

Curriculum Advisory Committees will continue to provide oversight, leadership, and vision for particular curricula, but recruitment and onboarding of new committee members will no longer be directly supported by the Core Team. The Incubator will continue to serve as a place for community members to come together around curriculum development, and we will be calling for community members to serve in the role of editors for The Carpentries Lab. After the currently active reviews have been completed, the Curriculum Team will no longer dedicate time to facilitating the review and publication of lessons submitted to the Lab.

The Carpentries Workbench, our revamped lesson infrastructure, is now live across all of our core curricula and will be supported by Erin Becker and Dr. Robert Davey, our Director of Technology.

We will continue to scale up our Collaborative Lesson Development Training, dependent on community demand. That program will be supported by our Curriculum Team and Curriculum Development Trainers.

If you have questions about lesson maintenance, Collaborative Lesson Development Training, The Carpentries Lab, Incubator, or Workbench, please contact curriculum@carpentries.org or Toby directly at tobyhodges@carpentries.org.

Community Programming

The Community Engagement Team is now led by Dr. Kari L. Jordan, our Executive Director, and supported by Dr. Angelique Trusler, our Community Manager, and Oscar Masinyana, our Communications Manager. We will continue to host multiple Welcome Sessions each month to onboard new community members and Instructors. Angelique will continue to support Regional calls for the African Carpentries Community, and we will continue offering Zoom rooms and communication channels as resources for community members organising other meet-ups. We will continue to release our monthly newsletter, Carpentries Clippings, to keep the community informed about programmatic developments and highlights from the community calendar. In a future blog post, anticipate more details regarding our support, including revisions to the Community Development Program.

Technology and Infrastructure Support

Our Technology Team, led by Dr. Robert Davey and supported by Maneesha Sane, our Associate Director of Technology, will continue to support the infrastructure behind our services - making sure AMY, our Etherpads, Eventbrite registration, Zoom links, AWS instances, website, Typeform surveys, and many, many others are functioning to support community engagement and team operations.

Thank You

Each of you is a catalyst for positive change and a testament to the extraordinary impact a united community can achieve. Though we have scaled back in some ways, our mission is impactful, and our vision is clear. With this approach to focus our Core Team on essential, mission-critical work, we offer a more streamlined approach to supporting you and anticipate positive shifts in community engagement.

We invite you to attend on 20 February 2024 at 02:00 UCT the community session, Reigniting Community: Coffee with The Carpentries Executive Director [add to your calendar] [find your time] hosted by Dr. Kari L. Jordan, where she will discuss this topic and more. You can sign up for the session on the Community Sessions Etherpad.