Join the 2026 Maintainer Onboarding Cohort!

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next cohort of Maintainers. We are delighted that 79 of 112 existing Maintainers have chosen to continue in their role for another year. To keep the community healthy and ensure that all lessons are well supported, we are calling for volunteers to step into the role.

This year, we are also onboarding Maintainers for our newest Lesson Program, HPC Carpentry, for the first time. Read on for details!

Who can be a Maintainer?

The Carpentries Maintainers work with the community to make sure that lessons stay up-to-date, accurate, functional and cohesive. They endeavor to be welcoming and supportive of contributions from all members of the community. More detailed information about what Maintainers do can be found in the Maintainers Handbook.

You do not need to be a Git expert to be a Maintainer. If you are familiar with the current Library Carpentry or Software Carpentry Git materials, you will have the foundation and support to learn the skills you will need as a Maintainer. Training on lesson maintenance and GitHub Skills will be offered in multiple time zones during onboarding to ensure you have the skills you need to succeed.

The Maintainer community has a dedicated Slack channel, TopicBox email list, and monthly meetings to help support you and the lesson you are working on. Lesson maintenance is asynchronous and can take place wherever it fits in your schedule, although we encourage you to find time for occasional co-working sessions on Zoom with your fellow Maintainers to help work through challenges.

The onboarding, skill-ups, and regular opportunities to connect with and learn from an established community make this a fantastic opportunity to develop your skills and get involved in Open Source in a supportive environment.

Which lessons need new Maintainers?

We are recruiting Maintainers for all of our official lessons, including both English and Spanish language materials. Although Maintainer Onboarding will be held in English, we strongly encourage applications from folks who are interested in maintaining one of the four official Carpentries lessons currently offered in Spanish.

This will be the first cohort to include new Maintainers for HPC Carpentry, which was approved as our fourth Lesson Program in February. We are calling for volunteers to get involved with the maintenance of these lessons as we prepare for the official launch of the new program in September. HPC Carpentry Maintainers will benefit from some prior experience of working in a shared computing environment and familiarity with a job scheduler. These lesson repositories also include some extended templating functionality, to allow for lessons to be customised for local conditions. The HPC Carpentry community provides documentation for this additional templating and will support new Maintainers as they learn to work with it.

We are particularly in need of Maintainers for the following lessons:

• Data Carpentry:
  • Foundations of Astronomical Data Science
  • Data Organization in Spreadsheets for Ecologists
  • Data Management with SQL for Ecologists
  • Project Organization and Management for Genomics
  • Introduction to Cloud Computing for Genomics
• HPC Carpentry:
  • Introduction to High-Performance Computing
  • HPC Workflow Management with Snakemake
• Library Carpentry:
  • Tidy Data
  • Introduction to Working with Data (Regular Expressions)
  • The UNIX Shell
  • OpenRefine
  • Open Qualitative Research with QualCoder
  • Open Qualitative Research with Taguette
  • Introduction to Data for Archivists
  • Intro to AI for GLAM
  • DMP Course for Librarians
• Software Carpentry:
  • Control de versiones con Git
  • La Terminal de Unix
  • R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles

If you are interested in helping maintain, improve, and grow our lessons, please apply to be a lesson Maintainer. You will be asked to choose which technologies (e.g., R, Python) and topics or domain areas (e.g., geospatial, ecology, library sciences), and languages (English or Spanish) you would be comfortable maintaining a lesson in.

Application information

Applications to join the 2026 Maintainer Onboarding cohort may be submitted via the short application form until the end of 13 April anywhere on Earth. (Check your local time.).

If you have any questions about the application or about being a Maintainer, please reach out to The Carpentries Curriculum Team or Jose Niño Muriel, the Maintainer Community Lead.