Election Process and Timeline

The election for the 2027 community-elected Board of Directors will open on November 2, 2026 and close on November 13, 2026 at midnight, anywhere on Earth.

Eligible Voting Members will receive an email from The Carpentries Core Team with the subject “Confirming eligibility to vote in The Carpentries 2027 Board of Directors Election”. If you do not receive the email but feel you have contributed sufficiently to the Carpentries community, please complete the Application for Voting Membership before October 30, 2026.

All eligible Voting Members will receive a personal ballot and voting instructions from The Carpentries via ElectionBuddy by November 2, 2026. For more information about the Board of Directors and the election process, read our blog post on the Call for Candidates for The Carpentries Board of Directors. Please email questions or concerns about the election process to team@carpentries.org.

Meet the Candidates

The self-nominated candidates for the four open Community-elected seats were asked to submit statements about their previous work with The Carpentries and their specific interests for Board of Directors participation. Candidate responses to the question “How would you contribute to the growth and success of the Carpentries community as a member of the Board of Directors?” are presented below in the order in which their applications were received.

Greg Wilson

I co-founded Software Carpentry and was its first Executive Director (2012–2015), then served as the Director of Instructor Training (2015–2016), where I improved and delivered its train-the-trainers course.

First, I learned the hard way that a community like this lives or dies by how it makes decisions, resolves conflicts, and recruits and supports the people who do the work. Having run Software Carpentry through growth and succession, I want to help the Carpentries keep its governance transparent, accountable, and humane as it embarks on a period of restructuring and rebuilding.

Second, I would work to keep the focus on foundational computational and data skills for researchers, and to make sure the people who teach and maintain the lessons are heard in every decision the Board makes. I believe this will be particularly important as we figure out what to do with and about AI.

Finally, and most importantly, I would help the organization make itself more sustainable. Science is under attack in the United States in unprecedented ways, and funding is increasingly tight everywhere else. Funding models that have worked in the past are no longer sufficient, so the Carpentries must find or create new ones. This will require both hard work and difficult decisions; I believe my experience has prepared me for both.

Novica Nakov

Norwegian Veterinary Institute

I hope to bring my experience to the Carpentries board and help the organization’s mission and goals. I have been involved with the Carpentries since 2020 as an instructor and in the last two years as a lesson maintainer (swcarpentry/sql-novice-survey).

However, I come from a long experience in the free software world: being involved with various work since 2000. I have worked on code and localization projects, advocacy, policy issues, and community building. I have been involved with the Mozilla project, drafted the Macedonian policy on free and open-source software use in government, advised local government on open data topics, and served as a president and program manager for the local NGO Free Software Macedonia.

As the board needs nonprofit finance experience and familiarity with nonprofit and open-source governance, I think I can offer that based on my past work both as a volunteer in the free software world and as a finance professional. I am originally from North Macedonia and now live in Norway. Maybe my personal experiences across different cultures will be beneficial for the organization.

But when it comes to growth and success of the community, I think perhaps the hardest part is to show up. A lot of the work depends on many individuals pulling in the same direction and getting recognition for it. I think I can contribute to developing this culture.

Luca Di Stasio

As a Carpentries Instructor and Trainer who worked on localizing the initiative for the Italian audience, I know the community from the inside: what it takes to teach well, to train others to teach, and to carry the mission into a new language and culture.

I began my career in academia and moved into engineering and project management in industry, so I have seen first-hand both where research software and data skills are built and where they are put to work under real constraints. Having worked across several countries, I have also learned how differently communities, institutions, and funders approach training, and how much local ownership matters for a global initiative to thrive.

At a time when public funding for efforts like ours is under pressure, I believe the Carpentries should widen its base of support without forgetting its original mission. Industry is a natural and underexplored partner: companies depend on exactly the skills we teach, struggle to upskill their engineers and analysts, and often have the resources and the motivation to sponsor workshops, instructor time, and lesson development.

On the Board, I would bring this perspective, a commitment to supporting regional and language-based communities, and a practical, collaborative approach to making the Carpentries more resilient, more diverse, and more widely reached.

Jonathan Wheeler

University of New Mexico

I first served as a helper at a Software Carpentry workshop in 2015 and have since taken on many roles within the community in my drive to build capacity for Carpentries participation, open science, and open pedagogy at my institution and throughout the state of New Mexico. While I have contributed lessons to the Carpentries Incubator and served briefly as a maintainer, the bulk of my contributions have been as an instructor and instructor trainer. Since becoming a certified instructor in 2019 and an instructor trainer in 2021, I have taught 17 instructor training workshops and organized 30 technical workshops in which I also served as an instructor. Much of this activity has been in support of growing a statewide Carpentries community, including recruiting instructors from diverse institutions and developing shared workshop infrastructure. Through these efforts, statewide capacity has grown from a handful of instructors to a cross-institutional network of 40+ instructors situated across R1 universities and community and tribal colleges. This ongoing project has provided me with experience in the development of instructional capacity across institutions with different missions, student populations, and organizational priorities.

I have further supported the community as a member of the Instructor Trainers Leadership Committee (ITLC). I was first elected to the ITLC in 2024 after a reduction in Core Team staffing, with the primary goal of my service being to maintain the strong connection between the trainer community and the Core Team during a time of transition. In that year, the ITLC expanded the scope of its activity to take on more responsibility for organizing and leading the monthly trainer meetings. As the ITLC secretary during that time, I am grateful to have contributed, through this and the committee’s other shared accomplishments, to the evolution of the ITLC in support of continuity and communication across the trainer community.

Each of these contributions has occurred within a series of expanding contexts – my institution, the state of New Mexico, and the broader trainer community. They demonstrate my commitment to the Carpentries Core Values and my ability to apply these values to create partnerships and grow sustainable communities. I believe that my experience with local and regional community development and the breadth of my engagement with the Carpentries have positioned me to serve as a valuable member of the Board of Directors. I am excited about this opportunity to bring the insights gained from these experiences into an even broader context with the potential for global impact.

Imran Khan

City University of New York (CUNY)

As a working Carpentries Instructor, I see the organization from the ground level, in the room with learners, which is the perspective I would bring to board decisions rather than a purely strategic or financial view.

My background is in building the operational infrastructure that lets volunteer-driven and mission-driven organizations scale without losing quality, work I have done through Build Well Labs, my own operations consultancy. I think The Carpentries’ biggest challenges as it grows are operational as much as programmatic: keeping curriculum current, supporting instructors consistently across a global and volunteer-heavy community, and building sustainable funding partnerships.

I also currently serve on the University of Virginia Batten Alumni Advisory Board, so I understand the specific discipline of being a board member, setting direction and supporting staff and volunteers rather than running programs myself day to day.

Yinlin Chen

Virginia Tech

As Associate Director of the Center for Digital Research & Scholarship at Virginia Tech University Libraries, a certified Carpentries Instructor, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science with years of experience in software development, AI, machine learning, and data science, I would focus on strengthening The Carpentries’ programs and services as a Board member.

Generative AI is rapidly changing how people learn to code and work with data. I research and develop AI technologies and have taught artificial intelligence and prompt engineering to learners from students to working professionals. I can help The Carpentries thoughtfully decide where AI belongs in its lessons and workshops while keeping the evidence-based, learner-centered teaching that makes it effective.

My career spans software engineering, computer science teaching and research, and academic libraries, and I have experience managing multiple nationally funded projects from planning through evaluation. This background helps me understand how programs can serve learners across disciplines and how to measure their outcomes and long-term impact. I would help the Core Team strengthen programs and clearly show their value to partners, funders, and the institutions that host Carpentries training.

I am committed to The Carpentries’ mission and to keeping its programs welcoming, accessible, and relevant for its global community of learners and instructors.

Tim Dennis

UCLA Library

I’ve taught with The Carpentries since 2015, back when the Library Carpentry lessons were still new. Since then I’ve been an Instructor Trainer, a Maintainer on the Instructor Training curriculum, and since 2021 co-chair of Library Carpentry’s curriculum governance. On the Board I’d work on a few things.

The Carpentries has to decide what appropriate use of AI looks like in our lessons and our teaching, and I want to help lead specific parts of that work, starting with Library Carpentry and grant-funded lesson development. I helped bring Intro to AI for GLAM into Library Carpentry, including a code sprint with contributors from the US, UK, Germany, and South Africa.

I can help with funding. I was lead grant writer and program director on an IMLS grant ($238K) that produced 15 open science lessons with 28 authors, now being piloted at institutions in the US and UK. One of them, DMP 101, is part of the Library Carpentry curriculum. I’m also co-PI on a $1.85M Sloan Foundation grant for the University of California’s Open Source Program Office, and I’ve raised donor gifts for student data training at UCLA.

I’d also build partnerships beyond our usual circles. Through OSPO I work with the open source and research software communities, who care about the same things we do: open materials and teaching each other. I co-chair the Research Data Alliance’s Libraries for Research Data interest group and spoke on open science at the 2023 RDA Plenary. I’ve been part of IASSIST since 2009, including a 2023 session with IASSIST colleagues at the International Symposium on Open Science for Information Professionals in Malaysia. I gave the keynote at the Library and Information Association of South Africa conference in 2017 and helped with Carpentries instructor training there. I’ve also talked about Library Carpentry and data skills in Prague and Sydney, and joined Carpentries community gatherings in Dublin and Manchester.

Last, I’d be a volunteer’s voice on the Board. I founded UC Carpentries, which pools instructors and helpers across ten UC campuses and runs on their time. Learners and instructors deserve someone at the table who still does that work.