The Carpentries: Building Local and Global Communities of Practice to Improve Data Skills

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. The Carpentries is comprised of three distinct lesson programs: Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry. Together, they comprise communities of volunteer researchers, educators, and more who develop lessons and teach intensive one to two day workshops on basic computing and data skills for researchers. This session provides an overview of the set of shared practices and principles that enable the Carpentries to run accessible, inclusive training workshops; teach openly available, high-quality, community-developed lessons; and foster an active, inclusive, diverse instructor community that promotes and models reproducible research as a community norm. We'll also cover how these shared practices and principles evolve and develop over time through assessment and feedback from learners and instructors. Finally, we'll share how the community operates to collaborative write, maintain, and improve lessons for a global learner community. Ultimately, attendees will come out of this session with a good understanding of how this highly successful global training program works, scales and improves over time.