How to Contribute

Software Carpentry is an open project. Like all such projects, it needs your help to grow, and you can contribute in many ways, large and small.

Teach

All of our slides, notes, and example programs are in our Git repository at https://github.com/swcarpentry/website, and you are free to use them however you want (so long as you give us attribution). Everything is designed so that individuals can work through what they need on their own, but universities, research labs, companies, and self-study groups have also used it in week-long crash courses and as part of longer classroom courses.

If you would like to deliver the course (as a Software Carpentry instructor or on your own) in one of these formats, or in one we haven't seen yet, please let us know—we'd be glad to provide you with training or advice.

Fix

If you see a mistake in on our website, please add a comment to the appropriate page, or mail us, and we'll fix it as quickly as we can. And of course, we always welcome pull requests (see below).

Create

If you are interested in developing the Software Carpentry content, we have organized our materials into a few different repositories on github.

Repository	Description	Contributing Docs
website	Holds the code to build most of our website content.	README, CONTRIBUTING
4_0	Companion repository to website holding the 4.0 teaching materials: online video lectures and slides.	No longer under development
3_0	Companion repository to website holding the 3.0 teaching materials: basic HTML pages and slides.	No longer under development
boot-camps	Notes, teaching materials and webpages used to help run one of our Bootcamps. There is an idiosyncratic development workflow for contributing to this repository explained in the contributing docs.	CONTRIBUTING
assets	Supporting files for the Software Carpentry organisation (e.g. papers, logos, etc.)
notebooks	A new repository to hold iPython Notebook versions of our teaching materials.
guide	This book aims to support Software Carpentry instructors as they develop teaching material and course plans.	Send us email

Pull requests are always welcome, or mail us to talk about what you'd like to do and how we can help.

Discuss

To stay up to date with us, you can follow our blog and sign up for our low-traffic announcement mailing list (approximately 2-3 emails a month):

We also run these higher-traffic mailing lists:

discuss	The main channel for discussion of direction and technology.
assessment	Where we talk about how to assess what learners already know, what they've learned from us, and what impact we've had.
data	For discussion of a new "data carpentry" module.
tutors	A by-invitation list used to match instructors to boot camps.

Learn

We run an online training course to help people become instructors. The course requires 2-4 hours/week for 8-10 weeks, and covers the basics of educational psychology, instructional design, and how to apply both to teaching programming to scientists. To find out more, visit the course website.