Final Update from Outgoing Maintainer Community Lead, Nathaniel Porter
For the past 2 years, I have had the privilege of serving The Carpentries as Maintainer Community Lead, a role that has continued to develop and become central to the Carpentries community over the last six years as Angela, Daniel, Vini, and now me have explored what it can be. At the end of September, I am leaving the role to focus on other goals (like fully launching Open Qualitative Research with Taguette and QualCoder Library Carpentry lessons), and so, in keeping with tradition, I get to share one final blog post about my experience.
Even if you’re not even mildly interested in becoming a Maintainer, I encourage you to read on, as there’s a lot for the whole community to be proud and take advantage of that I cover here. So let’s get to it.
Maintaining Community in a Maintainer Community
Maintainers write code, in a corner, by themselves right? Well about that…
A lot of the work does take place on our own schedules, but we’re not working alone. Most change requests aren’t written by Maintainers but submitted by Instructors, learners, and other community members that notice something could be better. Maintainers work with those contributors, in nearly every case always seeking feedback from other Maintainers as well, to turn them into the final improvements that become part of our lessons. And the #maintainer and #workbench Slack channels (as well as ones focused on specific lessons or tools) stay active with conversations about how to improve our lessons.
The Maintainer community goes a step beyond that, though. We meet monthly (at two times, so that people in different time zones can participate at less ridiculous hours) to share updates on how our work as Maintainers is going, to learn about new and upcoming Carpentries initiatives and changes to the lesson infrastructure, and to help each other work through challenges and learn best practices. Sometimes, we even set up co-working spaces right there in our meetings and spend 20-30 minutes just working on maintenance tasks in the (virtual) company of others - and knowing they’re available to ask for help.
As Maintainer Community Lead, I had the privilege of organising and supporting all of these forms of community. The micro co-working sessions mentioned above came about because I knew our monthly co-working corrals had lost steam but we still had strong expressed interest in setting aside time to body double while working on lesson maintenance. Likewise, our special meeting topics - such as dealing with stalled contributions, learning to use Github features like workspaces, lesson accessibility, and implementing new workbench features like tabbed lesson content and Glosario integration - were driven by paying attention to Slack messages, emails, and Github calls for help from our Maintainer community.
Resilient (Human) Infrastructure
Speaking of the Workbench, our developers and Maintainers have been lucky to have a strong foundation of lesson-building infrastructure and a responsive infrastructure team that helps us troubleshoot problems and regularly implements new features. And it’s just that - the people behind every aspect of The Carpentries - that makes us resilient, even when facing financial challenges on multiple fronts. Any researcher or institution with some determination might be able to make a lesson or two, but it takes a village of behind-the-scenes folks to keep everything usable, updated, and accurate.
A key piece of what builds this ongoing success is the attention given to recruiting and training Maintainers, lesson developers, and Instructors (who become contributors). Part of my role as Maintainer Community Lead has been to assist in the offboarding of retiring Maintainers and recruitment and onboarding of new Maintainers. All new Maintainers work through both a Maintainer Onboarding, where they learn about communications and infrastructure in the regular rhythms of maintenance, and a GitHub Skill-up for Maintainers on how we use Github’s infrastructure to work with contributions. Like Carpentries Instructor Training (incidentally the lesson I maintain), these workshops that I helped organise and teach provide more than just what they say on the box; they help build relationships and teach skills that can be applied in other work within and beyond The Carpentries.
From Co-working to Co-creating
One exciting aspect of working with Maintainers these past 2 years has been watching some major initiatives blossom and create impact. I’ll call attention a couple here, without claiming to have been the major factor in their success, but absolutely having been blessed to follow along and help navigate some challenges here and there.
The first major recent initiative I want to share is internationalisation efforts. For some time, The Carpentries has had a number of Spanish versions of lessons. You can find them at the Lessons page by filtering by language. But community members have taken up the cause of internationalisation recently to translate lessons into Ukrainian, Japanese, and more, and have developed infrastructure that allows lesson translators to take advantage of recent technological advances and keep translated lessons up to date with changes in the English lessons without breaking all the time. This is all in addition to our multilingual data science glossary, Glosario, which has been significantly expanded through recent contribution drives.
Second, there have been a number of major lesson updates and launches. Notably, the Software Carpentry Git curriculum was updated to more culturally inclusive examples, the Data Carpentry Ecology R lesson was overhauled and modernised (with Python on the way), and High-Performance Computing Carpentry entered lesson program incubation. As part of The Carpentries website overhaul last year, we also made major updates to the Maintainer Handbook, with extensive input from Maintainers at our monthly meetings and on Slack.
Changes in technology (outside our control) necessitated the last pair of changes I’ll call attention to here. The first of these was changes to licensing agreements for some of the software we teach, leading to a Lesson Setup Task Force which reviewed licenses, setup processes, and alternatives to most of the tools we taught, and produced recommendations for each tool, helping implement some of the more time-critical recommendations for our Python lessons. Along with that, a grassroots coalition of community members has had multiple discussions of how recent developments in AI technology should (or shouldn’t) change what and how we teach, leading to a pair of blog posts and the development of model language for lessons that’s now been implemented or proposed in at least nine lessons. Maintainers were critical to both efforts, bringing both their diverse expertise and their experience working closely with lessons and contributors to the discussion.
One of my favorite things about all of these initiatives is that they show how that our community’s creative force comes not from just one or two community groups - like lesson developers or The Carpentries Core Team. Maintainers, Instructors, translators, infrastructure teams, governance committees, and accessibility advocates all work together to make our lessons what they are!
Thank You
And that brings me to what I want to leave you with as I finish my service as your Maintainer Community Lead: a profound sense of gratitude to be part of such a diverse, global, dedicated, compassionate, and collaborative community that volunteers your time in dozens of ways to ensure that learners in your local communities and across the world have the tools they need to learn computing, data science, and library skills that can equip them for research and service. As is often the case, though I have been the volunteer with the title, the gift has been what I have received from the community. See you around. Peace.