What a year.
There is not a more eloquent way for me to describe 2020. As a community, we faced seemingly insurmountable barriers, and yet we are still standing.
2020 was a year of focusing on the essential. In our personal lives, as a community, and as an organisation, we were forced to adjust how we live and work, and how we support one another. Despite the many challenges, our values remained strong and we made progress toward our most significant milestones.
We developed resources and support for our community segments, including our Instructors, Library Carpentry community, Member Organisations, Trainers, and Maintainers. We launched the Community Facilitators Program, a major step in our efforts to support our diverse community. We took time to enhance our awareness of how bias affects the way we communicate, both verbally and non-verbally. We immersed ourselves in accessibility. We put all non-essential work to a halt to make the transition to online workshops. We improved our business operations and data privacy practices. We focused on the essential.
You were with us every step of the way, and for that I am truly grateful.
As we continue to strengthen our organisational structure and our capacity to be strategic and responsive, we will act openly, lead with curiosity, and advocate for the growth and development of The Carpentries community. We will work to empower our Member Organisations through the development of programs that plan for and offset associated costs. We will develop accessible templates and documentation for our community. We will improve mechanisms for participation by investigating ways to support more languages, and better understanding the needs of signing and nonsigning members of the Deaf and hard of hearing community.
We will do it all - together. I cannot wait.
In service to each and every one of you,
Kari L. Jordan, Executive Director of The Carpentries
In 2020, The Carpentries began celebrating our first year with Dr. Kari L. Jordan as our new Executive Director and a third year of success in leading the way for our vision and values of inclusive teaching of data and coding skills. At the same time, the world was presented with a myriad of challenges, from virtual work to virtual learning, to insecurity across every aspect of our lives. The Carpentries community rallied together to compile our expertise in instruction and inclusion into an open set of best practices for teaching our workshops online. Our work continued with very little pause.
The need for open and reproducible science has never been stronger. Science must be able to move quickly, accurately, and openly when the entire world is responding to a previously unknown pathogen. The need for training and support in the skills that allow for this type of work, especially in a learning environment that can adapt quickly to changing environmental needs, was loud and clear. We were, and will continue to be, ready to respond. Our global representation meant that we had access to the global expertise of teaching through disasters and uncertainty. We are a strong community and rose to the challenge of maintaining our mission through a global crisis.
Thus, 2020 became a different kind of celebration. Throughout our communal grief and worry, we were able to celebrate the work we have long fought for. What we sometimes in the past had to defend was now being showcased as invaluable and lifesaving.
The Carpentries mission is an essential one. We continued our work despite unprecedented difficulties. We will go on no matter what the world brings. We celebrate watching our learners learn and grow. We celebrate maintaining our global connections to colleagues. We celebrate the growth and hard work of our Core Team. We celebrate you, the members of our community.
In 2021, we will continue to celebrate our work, lift up the voices needing to be heard, and keep our mission pushing forward.
The Carpentries builds global capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. We train and foster an active, inclusive, diverse community of learners and instructors that promotes and models the importance of software and data in research. We collaboratively develop openly-available lessons and deliver these lessons using evidence-based teaching practices. We focus on people conducting and supporting research.
In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, The Carpentries reconfigured our operations and began the Online Workshops Pilot to support completely virtual delivery of workshops. Additionally, we hosted a 7 week virtual conference, CarpentryCon @ Home in lieu of our usual in-person event.
Our team grew by 50% as we onboarded 5 new Core Team members and welcomed a new Executive Director. Additionally, we reaffirmed our commitments to our community by developing resources like The CarpentryConnect Planning Kit. We continued our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work with the support of a grant from Mozilla for Core Team professional development. During HacktoberFest we worked to increase definitions on Glosario, the online, multilingual glossary of data science terms. We onboarded new community members to our various roles including trainer, maintainer, and the Instructor Development Committee, along with new roles like Community Facilitators.
In 2020, we also emphasized development and capacity building for The Carpentries. This included our first ever fundraising campaign which, with the help of our community, raised $15,000. We updated the Carpentries Bylaws and made steady progress on our Strategic Plan for 2020-2025. Furthermore, The Carpentries worked with the Network of the National Library of Medicine to bolster Library Carpentry workshops in the health and biomedical research communities. Finally, we scaled our processes and infrastructure for sustainability including work on workshop email automation and a revamped platinum membership.
In 2021, The Carpentries will be developing our Maintainer program to better support those who look after our lessons, and streamlining the process for Instructor Selection. We will also be testing and implementing a new and more accessible lesson template, to simplify the process for contributing to Carpentries lessons.
Additionally, we will be working on developing our assessment strategy in order to help serve as a basis for streamlining our Instructor Training workflows and expanding our offerings of the bonus module for certified instructors that aids in the transition to teaching Carpentries Workshops online.
The Carpentries has already made strides this year in our workshop administration as we have officially implemented automated emails into the workshop request workflow, and we will be presenting several themed discussions this year around the topic of workshop planning.
We are hoping to introduce more Community Facilitation roles in The Carpentries, starting with the role of Code of Conduct facilitators. Additionally, we will be redesigning The Carpentries website and handbook, and optimising for accessibility and content discoverability in the process.
This year, The Carpentries will receive a grant from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in support of work we are undertaking to support our community of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous scientists and developers. The Carpentries also received funding from the Code for Science & Society Event Fund to support CarpentryConnect South Africa. The Carpentries is continuing to scale and expand access to Instructor training with the support of grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Gordon and Betty More Foundation
Since 2012 and as of the end of 2020, we have run 2,700 workshops in 71 countries and trained 2,800 volunteer instructors to deliver our 45 collaboratively developed, open lessons to 66,000 novice learners at our 98 member sites and beyond...
In 2020, we trained 426 Instructors, a decrease of 38% from 2019
In 2020, we ran 368 workshops, a decrease of 41% from 2019
With the onset of the global pandemic, The Carpentries worked to quickly shift to online instruction, but workshop and instructor training numbers decreased as compared to the year prior due to the widespread shifts in operations globally. However, The Carpentries is entering 2021 with online teaching structures in place and protocol ready to return to its previous level of workshops and instructor trainings.
93% of learners surveyed would recommend Carpentries Workshops to a friend or colleague.
| Q1 Finances | USD | Q2 Finances | USD | Q3 Finances | USD | Q4 Finances | USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Income | $164,071 | Income | $435,176 | Income | $190,941 | Income | $1,356,338 |
| Expenses | $356,976 | Expenses | $433,762 | Expenses | $479,273 | Expenses | $589,707 |
| Net Income | ($192,905) | Net Income | ($1,415) | Net Income | ($288,332) | Net Income | ($766,631) |
| Income by Category | USD | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Grants & Sponsorships | $1,191,843 | 55.52 |
| Memberships | $638,616 | 29.75 |
| Workshops | $86,250 | 4.02 |
| Instructor Training | $26,900 | 1.25 |
| Donations | $22,100 | 1.03 |
| Curriculum | $2,500 | .12 |
| Other | $178,317 | 8.31 |
| Total | $2,146,526 | 100 |
| Expenses by Program | USD | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Administration | $759,969 | 40.86 |
| Instructor Training | $257,713 | 13.86 |
| Curriculum Development | $235,826 | 12.68 |
| Community Engagement | $228,348 | 12.28 |
| Membership | $148,085 | 7.96 |
| Fundraising | $133,096 | 7.16 |
| Workshop Administration | $96,680 | 5.20 |
| Total | $1,859,718 | 100 |
| Expenses by Category | USD | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Team | $1,307,339 | 70.30 |
| Consultants | $284,879 | 15.32 |
| Fiscal Sponsorship | $188,193 | 10.12 |
| Software & Subscription Services | $42,714 | 2.30 |
| Legal & Professional | $25,887 | 1.39 |
| Meetings & Travel | $9,430 | 0.51 |
| Program Supplies & Communication | $1,275 | 0.07 |
| Total | $2,146,526 | 100 |
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