Teaching unofficial Carpentries workshops

An official Carpentries workshop must cover the core lessons for that lesson program”s curriculum. Read more about the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry lessons. The workshop must also be taught by at least one certified Carpentries Instructor. While Instructors do receive lesson program specific badges, The Carpentries considers any badged Instructor qualified to teach any lesson.

All our lessons are available under a Creative Commons license, so anyone is welcome to use our lessons as they wish, provided they attribute them back to us. We often get questions about running un-official Carpentries workshops – meaning they are taught by non-certfied instructors, or they cover a portion of our curriculum but not the whole thing. We are excited to hear when this happens, but it is not something we are formally tracking.

We know this happens because our community members recognize the value of our curricula and have taken the initiative to adapt it to other contexts, where a two day workshop covering our full lesson set may not be the best fit. This demonstrates a lot of effort by the instructors and organizers. Also, while the impact on the learners is different than what we”d expect from a full workshop, there is still something significant that learners are taking away from this event. We may consider exploring ways to track these non-standard workshops (both to acknowledge the effort instructors put in and the impact it has on learners), but we don”t currently have the capacity to commit to this. So please continue doing all the wonderful work you do - and we hope we can reflect on this more soon!