Carpentries Project

Carpentries Project
Name	Carpentries Project
Formation	1998
Type	Nonprofit
Region served	Global

Carpentries Project is an international nonprofit organization focused on teaching computational and data skills to researchers, practitioners, and educators. Founded from grassroots efforts in the late 1990s, the project provides instructor training, lesson development, and community-led workshops across universities, research institutes, libraries, and corporations. Its activities intersect with a wide range of academic, governmental, and nonprofit institutions, and it collaborates with professional societies, funding agencies, and open-source communities.

History

The initiative emerged alongside movements at Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Microsoft Research, and Harvard University during the rise of the World Wide Web and open-source projects like Linux and Git. Early influences included communities around Bioinformatics groups at European Molecular Biology Laboratory and computational training at National Institutes of Health and Max Planck Society. Growth in the 2000s linked to developments at National Science Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Sanger Institute, and collaborations with library networks such as the British Library and Library of Congress. The organization expanded through partnerships with research infrastructures like CERN, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and university consortia including University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of Toronto. Workshops and lesson-sharing drew participation from communities associated with European Bioinformatics Institute, Broad Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Organization and Governance

Governance has involved nonprofit boards, advisory councils, and steering committees with representatives from institutions such as Association of American Universities, Research Data Alliance, Open Knowledge Foundation, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and professional groups like American Statistical Association, Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE. Funding and oversight mechanisms have connected the project to foundations including Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and governmental funders such as European Commission programs and national agencies like Science Foundation Ireland. Regional nodes have coordinated activity in networks with Australian Research Council, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Training and Curriculum

Curriculum development drew on pedagogical efforts and open pedagogy models used at Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale University. Lessons cover tooling and workflows used at GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Topics intersect with research methods practiced at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, European Space Agency, and domain sciences in labs at Sanger Institute, Janelia Research Campus, Riken, and Max Planck Institutes. Instructional design adapts methods from Bloom's taxonomy and assessment practices used by organizations such as American Educational Research Association and International Society for Technology in Education.

Community and Outreach

The community grew through local and regional chapters at institutions including University of Edinburgh, University of Melbourne, University of Cape Town, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Seoul National University, and networks tied to UNESCO and United Nations agencies. Outreach programs collaborated with societies such as Royal Society, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, European University Association, and subject-specific groups like American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, Genetics Society of America, and American Chemical Society. Training events appeared at conferences run by NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, ISMB, and AGU and featured in workshops alongside repositories like Zenodo and Figshare.

Impact and Metrics

Impact assessment referenced standards and metrics used by Open Science Framework, DataCite, and bibliometric indicators tracked by Clarivate and Scopus. Evaluation draws on case studies conducted at institutions including University of California, San Diego, Princeton University, University of Washington, and ETH Zurich, and metrics reported to funders such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and European Research Council. Outcomes relate to reproducibility initiatives at Center for Open Science, software citation advocacy led by groups including FORCE11, and training outcomes valued by employers like Google, Facebook, IBM, and Intel.

Partnerships and Funding

Partnerships span universities, research infrastructures, nonprofit organizations, and commercial technology firms including Google Research, Microsoft Research, Amazon Web Services, Intel Labs, and NVIDIA. Collaborative grants and sponsorships have come from National Institutes of Health, DARPA, European Commission Horizon 2020, Wellcome Trust, and philanthropic organizations such as Gates Foundation and Knight Foundation. The project has worked with professional societies and consortia including Association for Computing Machinery, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Research Data Alliance, and regional bodies like European Research Council and Australian Research Council to scale training and maintain open educational resources.

Category:Educational organizations