The Carpentries is an open, global community teaching researchers the skills to turn data into knowledge. Since 2012 we have taught 700+ R workshops & trained 1600+ volunteer instructors. Our workshops use evidence-based teaching, focus on foundational and relevant skills and create an inclusive environment. Teaching the Tidyverse allows learners to start working with data quickly, and keeps them motivated to begin and sustain their learning. Our assessment show that these approaches have been successful in attracting diverse learners, building confidence & increasing coding usage. Through our train-the-trainer model and open, collaborative lessons, this approach scales globally to reach more learners and further democratize data.
Tracy Teal has been working with open source communities as a developer, instructor and project leader throughout her career. As a PhD student at Caltech and then as an Assistant Professor in bioinformatics at Michigan State University, she saw that the bottleneck to discovery was no longer data production, but the skills and perspective to work with data. She went on to co-found Data Carpentry to scale data training along with data production and then became Executive Director of The Carpentries, continuing to develop open curriculum and an inclusive instructor community. She is currently the Open Source Program Director at Posit where she is passionate about supporting open source developers and expanding access to tools that help people use data to answer the questions that are important to them.
