Engaging with the Maintainer Community

Last updated on 2026-04-25 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How do I get in touch with other Maintainers?
  • What resources exist for supporting me in this role?

Objectives

  • Join the appropriate communication channels to stay connected with fellow Maintainers.
  • Know how to get in touch with others in The Carpentries who support Maintainers.
  • Add Maintainer meetings to your calendar.

Synchronous communications

Maintainer meetings

The Maintainer community meets virtually on the third Tuesday of each month at two different time slots, to enable participation from Maintainers in different time zones. We will take time together to add these meetings to your calendar in a moment.

We strongly encourage all new Maintainers to join our monthly meetings regularly, as these are an excellent place to connect with the broader Maintainer community, engage in discussions around topics of interest to Maintainers, and stay informed about upcoming work by other parts of The Carpentries community that may impact lesson maintenance.

We recognize that not everyone can attend these monthly meetings, and so also communicate important information through dedicated Maintainer channels on TopicBox and Slack. So don’t worry if you can’t attend! We do highly recommend joining, as it’s a good way to get to know other Maintainers.

Discussion

Add to Your Calendar (5 minutes)

Add the monthly Maintainer meetings to your calendar by either

  • subscribing to The Carpentries community calendar and copying events to your Google Calendar, or
  • clicking the TimeandDate links on the Maintainers CodiMD pad to convert the events to your local time, and adding to your calendar manually.

If you are planning to attend the upcoming meeting, please register in Pretix. Pretix will automatically calculate the event time in your local time zone and will send you a calendar invite and event reminders. It also helps us to track the impact of our different community meetings.

In addition to these monthly opportunities to connect across the broader Maintainer community, we recommend each set of co-Maintainers for a particular lesson set-up regular co-working times, at least monthly. You will be introduced to your lesson co-Maintainers after onboarding is complete, at which time we recommend you ask about existing co-working times and help establish a meeting schedule if one doesn’t already exist!

Asynchronous communications

Because The Carpentries community as a whole, and Maintainers also, are a globally distributed group, the vast majority of lesson contribution work is done asynchronously. It is important to subscribe to Maintainer-specific communication channels to stay up-to-date about news impacting lesson development and maintanence.

There are three primary asynchronous communication channels shared across the Maintainer team.

Slack

Slack is the most active communication platform used by our community. We have a private, Maintainers-only Slack channel, which you will all be invited to during this onboarding. Our general Maintainers channel is a good place to ask questions of the full Maintainer team, or to request input on specific issues and pull requests. Most curricula also have a public Slack channel for discussing issues with the community (browse for channels starting with dc, hpc, lc, or swc). Specific curriculum channels have not historically been very active, but we encourage any efforts to increase interaction with the community on these channels. You can also use curriculum-specific channels for communicating with your co-Maintainers, or you can create a private channel for yourself and your co-Maintainers. If you would like a private channel to be created for you, please let us know.

TopicBox

The Maintainers TopicBox list is used primarily for announcements relevant to the full Maintainer team, including reminders about upcoming meetings. Posts from individual Maintainers asking questions or introducing topics for discussion are extremely welcome, but our Slack channel is a more active place for back-and-forth discussion.

A few lists exist around specific curricula (search for lists starting with curriculum, but most have not been very active. If you would like to have a public TopicBox list created for discussions of your lesson, or a private list for your Maintainer team, please let us know.

GitHub

The majority of day-to-day interactions with your co-Maintainers will be on GitHub. You will need to be subscribed to (“watching”) your lesson repository to get email alerts about new issues, pull requests, and other activity on your lesson. When posting to GitHub, you can use the @ symbol to “mention” an individual Maintainer, your lesson team, and / or your Curriculum Advisory Committee to ensure that the appropriate person or group sees your message. Feel free also to @ The Carpentries Curriculum Team (Toby Hodges and Erin Becker) using for example @datacarpentry/core-team-curriculum or @LibraryCarpentry/core-team-curriculum and / or the Maintainer Community Lead, Jose Niño Muriel (@josenino95).

Callout

Tagging in your Lesson Team

Each group of Maintainers is associated with a GitHub team. After you have completed this onboarding, you will be added to the appropriate Maintainer team. You will then be able to find the name of your team below:

General Carpentries News

Subscribing to these channels will ensure you are up to date on issues affecting your lesson and lesson maintenance in general. To have a broader overview of all the exciting activity going on in The Carpentries community, we recommend subscribing to one or more of the following channels:

If you would really like to keep up to date on everything that is happening, The Carpentries maintains a variety of mailing lists on TopicBox and over 100 Slack channels, including spaces dedicated to discussion of particular curricula, connecting local and regional groups, and job opportunities.

Discussion

Subscribe! (5 minutes)

That’s a lot of communication channels! You don’t need to subscribe to everything. The list below summarizes which channels are required and which are highly recommended.

Required

Highly Recommended

  • Any TopicBox lists or Slack channels related to your lesson

Take a few minutes to subscribe to the above channels. Write “done” in the Etherpad.

Discussion

Introduce Yourself (2 minutes)

While folks are working on subscribing to the channels above, I will add you to the private Maintainers Slack channel. Please introduce yourself on that channel.

To help us coordinate events aimed at our Maintainer community, it is very useful to have accurate information about each Maintainer’s time zone. We keep track of this information in our AMY database. Please take a moment to update your time zone, and other info if desired, in your AMY profile. If you don’t have any AMY profile, or are having trouble logging in, please let us know and we will help troubleshoot.

Discussion

Update your AMY Profile (5 minutes)

  • Login to AMY using your GitHub credentials at amy.carpentries.org.
  • In the upper-right hand corner, open the drop-down menu under your name and select “Your Profile”.
  • Click the “Edit” button in the upper left.
  • Add your Airport, Country, and/or Timezone to the appropriate fields.
  • Update any other information if desired.

Thank you!

Callout

Maintainer Capacity

Signing on as a Maintainer is not a lifelong commitment! The Carpentries recognises that this is a volunteer role and is committed to supporting your mental and emotional health. You are always free to step down from the Maintainer role, either permanently or to take a break. If you plan to take a short break (a couple of weeks), please let your co-Maintainers know. For longer breaks (a few months or longer), or if you would like to step down permanently, please notify the Curriculum Team by emailing team@carpentries.org so we can find someone else to support the lesson.

This also applies in reverse! If you are not able to get in touch with at least one other Maintainer for your lesson, please get in touch with the Curriculum Team. We may need to find more Maintainers to support the lesson.

Key Points
  • The Maintainer community communicates on TopicBox, Slack, and GitHub.
  • The Maintainer community meets monthly.