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Home> Blog> Subcommunity Spotlight: UK Carpentry Community

Subcommunity Spotlight: UK Carpentry Community

Aleksandra Nenadic Aman Goel
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Subcommunity Profile

The UK Carpentries community brings together people involved in teaching computational research skills, including Carpentry Instructors, helpers, and workshop coordinators.

The community has long-standing links with the Software Sustainability Institute, the well-developed UK RSE landscape, and several RSE groups with a strong interest in training, including the large groups that support the national supercomputing service and organisations like the Met Office. While the first Instructor Trainer Training workshop for the UK community was hosted in 2014, the UK Carpentries was formalised in 2021.

The UK community has also been responsible for pioneering a few Carpentries activities, such as translations, CarpentriesOffline and expansion of the Carpentries curriculum through lessons such as the Intermediate Research Software Development, and those in the HPC Carpentry and Library Carpentry programmes. More recently, the community has expanded its scope to focus on training for digital research technical professionals (dRTPs).

Aims and scope

The UK Carpentries subcommunity has the following aims:

  • get to know each other better and encourage collaboration.
  • share news from the Carpentry community and training news from the UK and worldwide.
  • get the community’s questions answered around lesson development, delivering workshops, Instructor training checkout, etc.
  • help the community in the UK with organising workshops and finding Instructors/helpers
  • organise and run other events together, e.g. the annual UK Training Community Day
  • provide a welcoming and inclusive environment for the community to share their experience, explore topics of interest, find collaborators for training-related projects and network.

How It Started

The community held its inaugural meeting in February 2021, led by the UK Software Sustainability Institute’s (SSI) research software training lead Aleks Nenadic, bringing together over 30 UK Carpentries Instructors, helpers, and workshop coordinators from across the UK. The community was established as a space for UK Carpentry community members to get to know each other, encourage collaboration, get questions answered, and help with organising workshops and finding Instructors and helpers. However, the community brings together all people involved in teaching skills for computational research, not just those from the UK.

Regular Activities

Meetings are typically held on the 4th Monday of each month, 16:00–17:00 UK time, via Zoom. Upcoming meetings and previous meeting minutes can be found in the UK community’s HackMD space.

Monthly community calls have been held consistently since February 2021, with well over 50 meetings to date.

Each meeting typically features:

  • sign-in, introductions, and an icebreaker.
  • a guest speaker or presentation on a topic of interest.
  • news, workshop updates and announcements from members.
  • a slot for Carpentries Instructor Training checkout (allowing new Instructors to fulfil their Get Involved checkout requirement).

Key Topics and Themes Over the Years

Workshop Delivery and Pedagogy

Members have shared experiences running Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry workshops across UK institutions. In late 2022, STFC’s Patrick Austin presented on teaching a large-scale hybrid “Intermediate Research Software Development in Python” course with 20 in-person and 21 online attendees, spread over 5 weeks, and 6 Instructors and 12 helpers — sharing hard-won lessons about hybrid delivery challenges.

Lesson Development

A recurring theme has been developing and improving Carpentries lesson materials. By December 2024, Aleks Nenadic announced that the intermediate-level Python training materials had been marked as stable and published on Zenodo — a process that took around three years, illustrating how long quality lesson development takes.

Lesson Language Translation

Olexandr Konovalov, a UK-based Instructor, established and coordinates the Ukrainian Carpentries Community. Originally, plans were to translate the Unix shell, Git, Python, and also the Carpentries Incubator GAP lesson using the Transifex platform — following a similar infrastructure previously used for Spanish translations. Since 2024, the translation infrastructure has been migrated to Crowdin. Various lessons are being translated, with their status reported here.

Olexandr Konovalov, together with other Ukrainian Carpentries Community members, also ran 6 pilot training events in Ukrainian for Git during 2023-2025 and the first full 2-day online workshop in Ukraine in January 2026, making Ukraine the 72nd country in the world to host The Carpentries workshops.

Most recently, together with Lucia Michielin (also a UK-based Instructor) and Yanina Bellini Saibene, Olexandr authored the chapter “Lost in Translation: Complexities and Good Practices of Translating Coding-Based Teaching Materials Across Multiple Human Languages” in the open-access book “Teaching Programming Across Disciplines”.

Lesson Infrastructure Transition

At CarpentryConnect Heidelberg 2024, Matthew Bluteau and Aleks Nenadic led a hack day activity that resulted in nine lessons being translated from the old Jekyll-style lesson template to the new Carpentries Workbench lesson template, with help from UK Carpentry community members.

CarpentryConnect and Community Event

A CarpentryConnect event was previously hosted in Manchester in 2019, organised by Aleks Nenadic and others, with around 100 attendees covering teaching discussions, skill-up sessions, lightning talks, and breakouts. The community participated in CarpentryConnect Heidelberg in November 2024, hosted at the European Molecular Biology Centre.

Apart from CarpentryConnect, the community has spearheaded a few events, including specialist training days at RSECon 2023 and 2025, both of which featured The Carpentries prominently. At Collaborations Workshop 2023, we organised a demo teaching session to encourage Instructors to return to teaching and in-person teaching.

Collaborative Lesson Development Training

The Carpentries launched the Collaborative Lesson Development Training programme in late 2023, alongside Instructor Training and focused on curriculum design, open-source collaboration, and GitHub-based good practices — receiving very strong early feedback from UK Carpentry community members.

CarpentriesOffline / miniHPC

Jannetta Steyn (with Colin Sauze) has been leading work on CarpentriesOffline and miniHPC — tools for running Carpentries workshops in environments without reliable internet — and has been running regular working meetings and skill-up sessions to create workshop websites.

RSE Competencies and Skills Framework

The community has engaged with the RSE Competencies Toolkit and the DIRECT skills and competencies framework, with Phil Reed, Aman Goel, Aleks Nenadic and others from the UK Carpentry community working on defining technical, personal, and interpersonal skills for digital research technical professionals, including RSEs and research data managers and stewards In January 2026, the DIRECT framework was discussed as a potential resource for comparing skills, supporting upskilling, and informing hiring and career pathways.

Software Carpentry Curriculum Governance

In early 2026, community members, including Aman Goel, were involved in the Software Carpentries Governance Committee, considering new courses for the curriculum, such as “Building Better Research Software”, intermediate Python development, and “Byte-sized RSE”, shorter teaching sessions, as well as reviewing and updating existing materials on Git. Learn more about the Software Carpentry Curriculum Governance goals for 2026.

Infrastructure and Meeting Tools

In January 2026, the community discussed moving away from Zoom (the community’s main meeting tool, whose Zoom room is owned by the University of Manchester, which is now discontinuing its licence) towards open-source alternatives such as Jitsi, with actions to evaluate options.

Key Achievements

  • Community built from scratch: The subcommunity grew from a first meeting of ~30 people in February 2021 to a sustained, active monthly community spanning dozens of UK universities and research institutions.
  • Sustained Instructor pipeline: The monthly checkout sessions have helped many new Carpentries Instructors complete their certification.
  • Lesson development and translation: Contributions have been supported through advice, sharing experiences and supporting members in taking on these activities - a significant contribution to global open education.
  • Networking and collaboration: Members have coordinated joint workshops, shared Instructors and helpers across institutions, and built lasting professional relationships across the UK RSE and research training community.
  • Contribution to the wider Carpentries: UK community members have contributed to global Carpentries governance, curriculum development, and events such as CarpentryConnect.
  • SSI Fellows pipeline: multiple members of the community were named SSI Fellows, and vice versa - many SSI Fellows get introduced to the Carpentries community and become actively involved in The Carpentries work as part of their fellowships.

Contact details and Social Media

Past CarpentryConnect Events

Carpentries community members in a group selfie Carpentries community members in a group selfie at CarpentryConnect in Manchester