Reflecting on Five Years: Publishing The Carpentries Strategic Plan Evaluation Report (2020-2025)
As The Carpentries community, we have spent the past five years working towards six ambitious goals to strengthen our global network of learners, Instructors, Maintainers, and Member Organisations. Our Strategic Plan Evaluation Report (2020–2025) is now published and archived on Zenodo, providing a comprehensive review of the progress we made together.
You can read and download the full report here: The Carpentries Strategic Plan for 2020-2025 Evaluation Report (Zenodo).
The report highlights achievements such as:
- Building capacity through local leadership programmes, new resources, and community events.
- Embedding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility into our operations and teaching practices.
- Expanding professional development opportunities for volunteers and Core Team members.
- Establishing structured processes for lesson development, maintenance, and review.
- Strengthening our organisational infrastructure and financial resilience.
- Amplifying our values and vision through advocacy, collaborations, and publications.
These outcomes are the result of collective effort across our community, and we are grateful for the contributions, energy, and creativity of all who participated.
Closing the Strategic Plan Repository
With the conclusion of the 2020–2025 Strategic Plan, we are archiving the GitHub repository that housed the plan and tracked our progress: The Carpentries Strategic Plan Repository. This ensures transparency while also making room for a new phase of planning and implementation.
Looking Ahead: 2026–2028
We are now preparing to share our Strategic Plan for 2026–2028, which will set the direction for the next three years. The forthcoming plan is organised around four strategic goals:
- Foster the development of a new curriculum in emerging domains, such as research software engineering (RSEng) and artificial intelligence (AI), to promote efficient, open, and reproducible research practices.
- Formalise a stable, sustainable revenue framework that prioritises flexibility and supports equity in communities with limited access to Carpentries programming.
- Establish a Community Scalability Model using linguistic, geographical, and community engagement metrics to predict capacity and enable equitable scaling of core programmes, with particular attention to geographically diverse communities.
- Empower Subcommunity Leaders to act as multilingual advocates for The Carpentries, coordinating local training and distributing open source lessons in their region’s primary language(s).
This new plan continues our commitment to openness, sustainability, and inclusivity, while preparing us for future challenges and opportunities.
Join Us
We invite you to read the evaluation report, reflect on our shared progress, and prepare for the exciting work ahead as we enter the next stage of our journey together.
Stay tuned for the release of the Strategic Plan for 2026–2028 in the coming weeks.