Maintainers needed for Carpentries OpenRefine lessons

Hi folks,

The Carpentries is looking for volunteers to help maintain open source lessons teaching OpenRefine. We are a community teaching software and data skills in workshops all over the world. Two of our lesson programs, Data Carpentry and Library Carpentry, include lessons teaching OpenRefine:

We recently put out a call for volunteers to join our community of lesson Maintainers: folks who take responsibility for the day-to-day upkeep of lessons, ensuring that the lesson sites remain working and processing/facilitating the wider community's contributions to update and improve the curriculum. Although the official deadline has passed and we generally got a great response, we would love to receive a few more expressions of interest from folks who want to contribute to the maintenance of the OpenRefine lessons.

We currently have >2500 certified Instructors and the community taught more than 300 workshops last year, so contributing to our lessons is a great way to make impact and help people learn to use OpenRefine to work with their data.

New Maintainers are provided with onboarding to orient them to The Carpentries, the responsibilities of Maintainers, the support they can expect to receive, and the channels through which they can communicate (GitHub, Slack, monthly community meetings, ...). We also offer a skill-up teaching some of the features of GitHub that can be used to make open source maintenance more effective and efficient. Maintainers do not need to be experts in Git/version control to be able to contribute. Indeed, we believe this is a great way for those interested in open source to gain experience and build these skills.

A couple of other members of this forum are already Maintainers of the lessons listed above. So if you choose to get involved, you know you would be joining a team of generous and knowledgeable folks! If you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch with me (tobyhodges at carpentries dot org) or reply here with your questions.

(Note: I would have liked to link out to the relevant lesson websites etc but I am limited to only two links in the post. Please respond here if you would like me to provide any more information and/or point you towards the relevant resources.)

1 Like

@TobyHodges, thanks for sharing the call here. I updated your post with links to the three lessons.

1 Like

Thank you so much for reaching out here @TobyHodges :slight_smile:
The Carpentries lessons are fantastic and we link to them as featured online courses on our website.
I was about to relay your call for volunteers on Mastodon but I realize the deadline that is mentioned there is 5 April - has it been extended?

1 Like

We are technically past the deadline. I am reaching out in a more targeted way as we would really benefit from more volunteers for the OpenRefine lessons. I think it will not hurt to adjust the date in the blog post, though.

I have updated the blog post now to extend the deadline until the end of this week.

Thanks so much for linking to the lessons from the OpenRefine site. I am delighted to hear that you find them useful.