About Us

Vision: Our vision is to be the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills.

Mission: The Carpentries builds global capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. We train and foster an active, inclusive, diverse community of learners and instructors that promotes and models the importance of software and data in research. We collaboratively develop openly-available lessons and deliver these lessons using evidence-based teaching practices. We focus on people conducting and supporting research.

Here you will find a range of useful information about our work. For more information on all things Carpentries, see The Carpentries Handbook. On our Reports page you’ll find our Annual Reports, Financial Reports, Grant Reports, and Assessment Reports.

About The Carpentries

The Carpentries project comprises the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry communities of Instructors, Trainers, Maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.

The Carpentries subscribes to a shared Code of Conduct. In January, 2018, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merged their projects to form The Carpentries. On November 1, 2018, The Carpentries Executive Council approved Library Carpentry as the third official Lesson Program of The Carpentries. The following two blog posts provide further background: Joint future for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry and Library Carpentry is now officially a Lesson Program!. Visit the individual Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry web sites for more detailed project histories.

The Carpentries Strategic Plan was developed by the Executive Council together with the Core Team and approved by the Executive Council in January 2020.

How is The Carpentries Managed?

The Carpentries is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit based in California, USA. Dr. Kari L. Jordan is the Executive Director, and governance of the merged Carpentries is undertaken by a Board of Directors.

How is The Carpentries Funded?

The Carpentries revenue sources include membership fees, grants and donations, Workshops and Instructor Training fees, sponsorships, and individual donations. These income streams support the work of the Core Team, workshop & lesson infrastructure, CarpentryCon, and our continued work towards The Carpentries mission. The Carpentries Annual Financial Reports provide more detailed information about our annual income and expenditures.

Individuals and organisations are welcome to donate to The Carpentries using the online portal. Organisations interested in supporting The Carpentries are also encouraged to read about becoming a Sponsor Organisation.

What Information is Where?

What is common across The Carpentries - the Code of Conduct, assessment, governance, instructor training, our privacy policy - will be found through this site, while specific Lesson Program material, will remain on the individual Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry sites. We will increasingly post on The Carpentries blog, rather than to individual Carpentries blog sites, and we will tweet through our Carpentries Mastodon account.

Join Us!

Organisations are encouraged to join us as contributing members to support the work we do. We welcome new people to our community. We have many ways to engage, including The Carpentries Mastodon feed, our Slack channel, subscribing to Carpentries Clippings, our twice-monthly newsletter, following our Facebook page, and by joining some of our email lists.

We announce a lot of what we do via our Mastodon feed. Follow us on Mastodon.

Referencing The Carpentries

The Carpentries, while sounding plural, is a singular entity. Therefore, when referring to The Carpentries, verbs should also be singular, e.g. ‘The Carpentries is …‘. The correct title for the merged organisation is The Carpentries. However, you can use terminology such as ‘A Carpentries workshop …‘. We have a Style Guide to help you.

We appreciate being mentioned in the acknowledgments sections of papers, theses, and proposals, as it helps us show current and potential funders what impact we are having. If you would like to acknowledge The Carpentries, please use wording like this:

We were aided in this work by the training and other support offered by The Carpentries [1].
[1] The Carpentries (https://carpentries.org)

The Carpentries in the Literature

Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry have been featured in many publications, and some members of The Carpentries community have written materials about our workshops, our history, and our impact. See our citations page for a list. Comprehensive reports about our impact can be found in our assessment section.

Do you know about other works that should be listed here? If so, please email team@carpentries.org to let us know.

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