Empowering the Carpentries Community to Contribute

[sstevens2]

One of the things I appreciate most about being part of The Carpentries Community is that I can re-use and build upon the work of other teaching and tech experts. For that same reason, as I am not an expert in accessibility myself, I'm really excited to be able to rely on the workbench's accessibility features such as descriptive dynamic links between lesson episodes and good contrast between the different text elements and backgrounds.

I am also excited about the possibilities for collaborating with more instructors on new lessons by making it easier for them to contribute. In the past, I have made lessons on GitHub and Jekyll and demos on making a lesson contributions. Those systems allow our materials to be public and invite contributions from everyone but aren't always the most beginner friendly. Decoupling the infrastructure from the lesson more and allowing for easy local rendering in RStudio will both make it easier for new instructors and lesson developers to contribute. Anything we can do to help make it easier for the individuals to contribute to the lessons brings more people into the community and shares more knowledge and experience.