Software Carpentry Governance Committee - Goals for 2026
Looking for New Committee Members!
The Software Carpentry Governance Committee is excited to share our plans for this year below.
We are looking for a couple of members to join the team, as several of this year’s committee members had to step away due to other commitments. If you are excited about helping to shape the future of the Software Carpentry lesson program and would like to participate, please fill in the application form, or send an email to Toby Hodges to indicate your interest or ask questions.
Expanding the Official Curriculum
The many years of running Software Carpentry workshops have shown that these workshops are an excellent start for beginners to get into scientific programming and manage their own data. However, a common question afterwards is what workshop can we take next? The Software Carpentry Governance Committee aims to address this question by adding at least one intermediate programming workshop to the SWC curriculum in 2026.
At present, two courses from the Carpentries Incubator are contenders:
Both courses address the What next? question and are under beta testing. They have been spotlighted in the community and have been improved over a few workshops. Participants learn how to deal with larger and more complex programming problems by being introduced to the software life cycle including planning, testing, and releasing software, as well as collaborative development.
While assessing which courses to add to the official curriculum, the SWC Governance Committee will document and publish this process. This will allow us to push some more of the excellent courses from the Incubator to official curriculum.
If you have any comments regarding the above selection or have suggestions for new courses that would be good contenders, please reach out to the committee at: swc-governors@lists.carpentries.org
Call for Lesson Development - Version Control with Git
We are very aware of discussions about moving away from big corporate technology, such as the dependency on GitHub as a host for Git repositories. There are many good reasons, including digital sovereignty for organisations, to use GitLab to host their own code repositories.
The SWC Governance Committee would be happy to support community members who would like to develop a GitLab alternative to the Version Control with Git lesson and publish it in the Incubator. We will review the new lesson for consideration after finalising the process for new lesson/workshop adoption into SWC.
If you are interested in contributing towards a new lesson, please reach out to us at: swc-governors@lists.carpentries.org