Join the 2025 Maintainer Onboarding Cohort!

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next cohort of Maintainers. We are delighted that 83 of 111 current Maintainers have chosen to continue in their role for another year, meaning that our need to onboard new Maintainers is not as urgent as it has been in previous years. Nevertheless, to keep the community healthy and ensure that all lessons are well supported, we are calling for volunteers to step into the role.

This year, we are also calling for volunteers to help update and maintain the Data Carpentry Ecology Python lesson, realigning it with the R lesson that was redesigned last year. Read on for details!

Who can be a Maintainer?

You do not need to be a Git expert to be a Maintainer. If you are familiar with the current Carpentries Git materials, you will have the foundation and support to learn the skills you will need as a Maintainer. Training on lesson maintenance workflows and GitHub skill up sessions will be offered in multiple time zones during onboarding to ensure you have the skills you need to succeed.

The Maintainer community has a dedicated Slack channel, TopicBox email list, and monthly meetings to help support you and the lesson you are working on. Lesson maintenance is asynchronous and can take place wherever it fits in your schedule, although occasional co-working sessions may be organised on Zoom to help work through challenges.

The onboarding, skill-ups, and regular opportunities to connect with and learn from an established community make this a fantastic opportunity to develop your skills and get involved in Open Source in a supportive environment.

Which lessons need new Maintainers?

We are recruiting Maintainers for all of our official lessons, including both English and Spanish language materials. Although Maintainer Onboarding will be held in English, we strongly encourage applications from folks who are interested in maintaining one of the four official Carpentries lessons currently offered in Spanish.

We are particularly in need of new Maintainers for the following lessons:

• Data Carpentry:
  • Foundations of Astronomical Data Science
  • Introduction to Cloud Computing for Genomics
  • Data Analysis and Visualization in Python for Ecologists (see note below)
  • Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists
  • Introduction to the Command Line for Genomics
  • Data Organization in Spreadsheets for Social Scientists
• Library Carpentry:
  • Data Intro for Archivists
  • Tidy Data for Librarians
  • Wikidata
  • Introduction to Python
  • Introduction to R
  • Introducing Computational Thinking
• Software Carpentry:
  • The Unix Shell
  • Databases and SQL

If you are interested in helping maintain, improve, and grow our lessons, please apply to be a lesson Maintainer. You will be asked to choose which technologies (e.g., R, Python) and topics or domain areas (e.g., geospatial, ecology, library sciences), and languages (English or Spanish) you would be comfortable maintaining a lesson in.

Looking for Developer-Maintainers for DC Ecology Python

Following the adoption of a redesigned version of the Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists lesson last year, there is now an opportunity for the Python lesson to be overhauled, realigning it with the narrative and learning objectives of its equivalent R lesson. So we are looking for volunteers who are keen to get involved with implementing these changes as well as taking responsibility for maintaining the repository. These new lesson developer-Maintainers will join current Maintainer, Carlos Rodrigues, and collaborate on redeveloping the lesson with the support of the Curriculum Team.

Lesson redevelopment inevitably requires more time than maintenance. Nevertheless, this is an exciting opportunity to get involved with a larger collaborative, open source effort. We anticipate that having the existing R lesson material to use as a reference will make the process significantly easier.

Application information

Applications to join the 2025 Maintainer Onboarding cohort may be submitted via the short application form until the end of 11 April anywhere on Earth. (Check your local time.).

If you have any questions about the application, about being a Maintainer, or about the redevelopment of the DC Ecology Python lesson, please reach out to The Carpentries Curriculum Team or Nathaniel Porter, the Maintainer Community Lead.