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feat: edits to CONTRIBUTING.md and Software Carpentry home page
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| # FIXME: eliminate some of these (duplicate social media information) | ||
| amy_url : "https://amy.carpentries.org/workshops" | ||
| board_inquiries : "[email protected]" | ||
| carpentries_url : "https://carpentries.org" | ||
| contact : "[email protected]" | ||
| dc_url : "https://datacarpentry.org" | ||
| lc_url : "https://librarycarpentry.org" | ||
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| excerpt: Teaching researchers the foundational computing skills they need to get more done in less time | ||
| --- | ||
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| <h2>About Software Carpentry</h2> | ||
| <h2>What is Software Carpentry?</h2> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Since 1998, | ||
| Software Carpentry has been teaching researchers | ||
| the computing skills they need to get more done in less time and with less pain. | ||
| Our <a href="https://carpentries.org/instructors/">volunteer instructors</a> | ||
| have run <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/workshops/past/">hundreds of events</a> | ||
| for more than 34,000 researchers since 2012. | ||
| All of our <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/lessons/">lesson materials</a> are freely reusable | ||
| under the <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/license/#cc-by">Creative Commons - Attribution license</a>. | ||
| Software Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental programming skills needed to conduct research. | ||
| Our mission is to provide researchers high-quality, domain-specific training | ||
| covering all aspects of research software engineering. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <p> | ||
| The <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/scf/">Software Carpentry Foundation</a> | ||
| and its sibling lesson project, <a href="{{site.dc_url}}">Data Carpentry</a>, | ||
| have merged to become The Carpentries, a fiscally sponsored project of <a href="http://communityin.org">Community Initiatives</a>, | ||
| a 501(c)3 non-profit incorporated in the United States. See the <a href="https://carpentries.org/team/">staff page for The Carpentries</a>. | ||
| </p> | ||
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| <div class="row"> | ||
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| <div class="medium-4 columns"> | ||
| <h4>Supporters</h4> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Software Carpentry is made possible by the generous support of | ||
| <a href="https://carpentries.org/members/">our member organisations</a> | ||
| and by the hard work of <a href="https://carpentries.org/community">our volunteers</a>. | ||
| We offer <a href="https://carpentries.org/membership/">several levels of institutional engagement</a>. We provide | ||
| <a href="https://carpentries.org/community">many | ||
| ways</a> people can engage with our community. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </div> | ||
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| <div class="medium-4 columns"> | ||
| <h4>Workshops</h4> | ||
| <p> | ||
| You can <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/workshops/request/">host a workshop</a> | ||
| or <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/workshops/">attend one</a> that someone else is hosting. | ||
| Our <a href="https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/policies/code-of-conduct.html">code of conduct</a> | ||
| and <a href="https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/hosts_instructors/index.html">operations guides</a> | ||
| describe how our workshops are organised and run. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </div> | ||
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| <div class="medium-4 columns"> | ||
| <h4>Conversations</h4> | ||
| <p> | ||
| You can <a href="mailto:[email protected]">send us email</a>, | ||
| <a href="https://carpentries.org/newsletter/">sign up for our newsletter</a>, | ||
| <a href="https://carpentries.org/blog/">read our blog</a>, | ||
| follow <a href="https://hachyderm.io/@thecarpentries">The Carpentries</a> on Mastodon, | ||
| or browse and raise issues against <a href="https://github.com/swcarpentry">our repositories on GitHub</a>. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </div> | ||
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| </div> <!-- /row --> | ||
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| <div class="row"> | ||
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| <div class="medium-4 columns"> | ||
| <h4>Make Things</h4> | ||
| <p> | ||
| As an open source project, | ||
| we rely on volunteers to | ||
| <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/lessons/">create our lessons</a>. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </div> | ||
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| <div class="medium-4 columns"> | ||
| <h4>Read Things</h4> | ||
| <p> | ||
| <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001745">Best Practices in Scientific Computing</a> | ||
| and | ||
| <a href="http://f1000research.com/articles/3-62/v2">Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned</a> | ||
| summarize what we've learned. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </div> | ||
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| </div> <!-- /row --> | ||
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| <h2>In the Beginning...</h2> | ||
| <p> | ||
| In 1995-96, | ||
| Greg Wilson organized a series of articles in <em>IEEE Computational Science & Engineering</em> titled, | ||
| "What Should Computer Scientists Teach to Physical Scientists and Engineers?" | ||
| These articles grew out of his frustration working with scientists | ||
| who wanted to parallelize complex programs | ||
| but didn't know what version control was, | ||
| how to write a unit test, | ||
| or even why they should break their programs down into functions. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <p> | ||
| In response, | ||
| John Reynders (then director of the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory) | ||
| invited Wilson and Brent Gorda (now at Intel) to teach a week-long course to LANL staff. | ||
| The course ran for the first time in July 1998, | ||
| and was repeated nine times over the next four years. | ||
| It eventually wound down as the principals moved on to other projects, | ||
| but taught us two valuable lessons: | ||
| </p> | ||
| <ol> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p> | ||
| There is tremendous pent-up demand for training in basic skills. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Textbook software engineering is not the right thing to teach most scientists. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </li> | ||
| </ol> | ||
| <h2>Going Open</h2> | ||
| <p> | ||
| The Software Carpentry materials were updated and released under a Creative Commons license in 2004-05 | ||
| thanks to support from the Python Software Foundation. | ||
| They attracted 1000-2000 unique visitors a month, | ||
| with occasional spikes correlated to courses and mentions in other sites, | ||
| and were used in a semester-long graduate course offered in 2007-09 at the University of Toronto. | ||
| Again, | ||
| we learned some valuable lessons; | ||
| the most important is that | ||
| while faculty in science, engineering, and medicine will agree that their students should learn more about computing, | ||
| they <em>won't</em> agree on what to take out of the current curriculum to make room for it. | ||
| Until that changes, | ||
| we have to deliver our lessons "between" standard courses. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <h2>The Video Version</h2> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Greg Wilson left the University of Toronto in April 2010 to reboot Software Carpentry | ||
| with support from nine sponsor organizations. | ||
| Over the next year, | ||
| he recorded 120 short video lessons and ran half a dozen week-long classes for his backers. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <p> | ||
| This version of Software Carpentry was much more successful than its predecessors, | ||
| in part because the scientific landscape itself had changed. | ||
| Open access publishing, citizen science, and dozens of other innovations | ||
| had convinced scientists that they needed to be able to do more than just crunch numbers. | ||
| We also made contact with like-minded organizations, | ||
| particularly <a href="https://thehackerwithin.github.io/">The Hacker Within</a>, | ||
| who showed us that intensive two-day workshops worked better than week-long classes. | ||
| Putting this all together led to our current model: | ||
| </p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Curriculum is developed and improved in a public repository | ||
| using methods borrowed from the open source software community. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Instructors volunteer their time, | ||
| while workshop host sites cover their travel and accommodation costs. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Instructors use live coding instead of slides | ||
| while learners following along on their own machines. | ||
| </p> | ||
| </li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| <h2>Scaling Up</h2> | ||
| <p> | ||
| In the fall of 2011, | ||
| Wilson worked with the Mozilla Foundation to prepare a grant to the Sloan Foundation | ||
| to put Software Carpentry on a more stable financial footing. | ||
| That grant, | ||
| awarded in January 2012, | ||
| and a second one later that year | ||
| paid for Wilson and some administrative support, | ||
| which allowed us to increase the number of workshops. | ||
| In turn, | ||
| that growth led to us starting a training program | ||
| to teach instructors the basics of educational psychology and instructional design. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <h2>The Present Day</h2> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Wilson left Mozilla in July 2014 to help found the Software Carpentry Foundation, | ||
| an independent non-profit volunteer sponsored by <a href="http://numfocus.org">NumFOCUS</a>. | ||
| Software Carpentry's governing body is a <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/scf/">Steering Committee</a>, | ||
| which is elected from and by its <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/scf/members/">members</a> | ||
| and assisted by an Advisory Board made up of representatives from partner organizations. | ||
| The Foundation's <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/scf/#committee-2015">first Steering Committee</a> | ||
| was elected in January 2015, | ||
| and in October 2015 | ||
| <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/team/#duckles.jonah">Jonah Duckles</a> began work | ||
| as the Foundation's new Executive Director. | ||
| Having started in 1998, | ||
| Software Carpentry is now a lesson program within <a href="{{site.carpentries_url}}">The Carpentries</a>. | ||
| Its focus is on the the computing skills researchers need to get more done in less time and with less pain, | ||
| and its <a href="{{site.carpentries_url}}/instructors/">volunteer Instructors</a> | ||
| have run thousands of events for almost one hundred thousand people since 2012. | ||
| <em>Our target audience is researchers who have some prior programming experience<em> | ||
| but who are largely self-taught | ||
| and are ready to move from writing short programs for personal use | ||
| to collaborating with others on larger, reusable pieces of software. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <p> | ||
| In February 2018, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merged their projects together | ||
| into a new project, The Carpentries, sponsored by <a href="http://communityin.org">Community Initiatives</a>. | ||
| With this merger, Software Carpentry has combined staff, budget and governance to form the new project. | ||
| The Carpentries continue the work of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, realizing that | ||
| the communities of instructors, members and lesson developers are stronger working together. With over 50 | ||
| member organizations in 10 countries, The Carpentries seek to build and grow communities of practice around | ||
| computational skills development for researchers. | ||
| We teach hands-on workshops in the Unix shell, verison control, and programming in languages such as Python and R | ||
| to increase computational competence and improve research efficiency. | ||
| Our evidence-based pedagogy, | ||
| combined with rapid iteration on content, | ||
| ensures that our lessons are directly connected to real scientific questions | ||
| and directly relevant to participants' research. | ||
| We create a friendly environment for learning to empower researchers, | ||
| and all of our lesson materials are freely reusable under an open license. | ||
| </p> | ||
| <p> | ||
| Workshops like ours cannot teach people everything they need to know about research software engineering, | ||
| but they drastically reduce the barrier to entry | ||
| and impart the skills and confidence needed for continued learning and engagement. | ||
| To learn more about our history and the lessons we've learned along the way, | ||
| please see the paper | ||
| "<a href="http://f1000research.com/articles/3-62/v2">Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned</a>". | ||
| please see "<a href="http://f1000research.com/articles/3-62/v2">Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned</a>". | ||
| </p> | ||