Instats Pilot: What and Why? (and a Call for Helpers)

At the end of 2025, we began exploring a partnership with Instats to offer recorded Carpentries workshop sessions. Instats is a mission-driven organisation that focuses on delivering a diverse range of seminars that inspire high-quality, ethical, and impactful research.

Why are we partnering with Instats?

The goal of working with Instats is to create more opportunities for anyone who can’t attend in-person or locally hosted workshops due to availability in their region, and circumstances such as time zone conflicts. An added benefit is the ability for all learners to engage with our lessons at their own pace.

Equally important, we hope this partnership with Instats will benefit the Instructor community by offering a new way to recognise and reward Instructor contributions. Teaching Carpentries workshops through Instats provides increased visibility and compensation opportunities, and creates another avenue to give back to the community members who support our mission.

What’s next and how can you help?

To trial this partnership, we will be hosting multiple pilot workshops. The workshops will each be six to eight-hour sessions focused on one or two Carpentries lessons. They will be delivered live and recorded through Zoom. The edited recordings will then be offered as on-demand sessions, showing only the Instructor and their screen.

The details of our first pilot workshop are as follows:

• Plotting and Programming in Python | 22-23 April | 8:00 am - 12:00 pm Eastern Time (UTC -4)

The details for our remaining workshops will be announced as they become available.

For our pilot workshops, we have two ways we are hoping that community members will get involved!

• Staying true to our Carpentries roots, we will need helpers to assist with these sessions. The helper role is not paid but, as mentioned above, we hope that this pilot leads to more paid opportunities for Instructors in the future. If you are interested in being a helper for either session, please connect with us at team@carpentries.org.
• Spread the word! These learning opportunities are open to anyone and everyone. Please share within your networks using the following link: https://instats.org/seminar/plotting-and-programming-in-python.

We are excited for this opportunity to increase our impact within the community and beyond!

Don’t hesitate to let us know your questions at team@carpentries.org.

We can’t wait to connect with you!