Software Carpentry has been around for a long time, a labor of love of Greg Wilson and many others. With support from the Sloan Foundation, the Mozilla Science Lab has helped it to grow such that, in the past year, we’ve reached more than 4,000 researchers and librarians worldwide and trained over 195 instructors (from the sciences and library sciences) who carry the torch and run Software Carpentry workshops on their own. The expansion of the community makes us excited to announce the creation of an independent Software Carpentry Foundation. This new organization is dedicated to fostering the growth and evolution of Software Carpentry work while giving the hundreds of contributors and institutions who’ve helped shape it a direct role in governing the project. Greg, naturally, is stepping into the project lead role.
What this means for you
Mozilla Science Lab will continue coordinating bootcamps and train-the-trainer programs, so from a user perspective, nothing really changes. Over time, as the new foundation gets its feet, we may transition some or all of the coordination to it. In the interim Bill Mills, the Science Lab’s community manager (and Software Carpentry instructor) with the help of Arliss Collins, the Lab’s Training Coordinator, will ensure that we keep delivering great programming around the world. If you want to seize the opportunity to play a larger role in the Software Carpentry governance, please reach out to Greg.
Mozilla is thrilled to be a partner with the new Software Carpentry Foundation. We believe that this community and the organization has a key role in the building awareness and technical capacity, so critical to the open science movement. Congrats to Greg Wilson and the rest of the Software Carpentry team, and many thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Software Sustainability Institute, the University of Melbourne, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and NumFOCUS for their support.
For more on today’s announcement, read the press release at the Software Carpentry website. Want to get involved in helping train the next generation of open, web-enabled researchers? Get in touch.