The Carpentries Incubator is a place for collaborative development of new lessons. It provides a space for The Carpentries community to create, test, and improve lessons, supported by systems, process, and training to foster collaboration and promote better lesson design.

The Carpentries Incubator contains more than 100 lesson projects. You can browse these in the repository listing of this GitHub organisation, or use the table of Community Developed Lessons on The Carpentries website.

Lessons designed, developed and published as Open Source projects are easier for others to re-use, contribute to, maintain, and sustain. The Carpentries supports the community's lessons in the Incubator by:

• providing infrastructure to build and publish accessible lesson websites from GitHub repositories (The Carpentries Workbench)
• hosting and maintaining communications channels for the lesson development community
• providing training and guidance on lesson development
• helping lesson developers make connections and increase awareness of their lesson projects in the wider community

Lesson developers retain full ownership of the lessons they develop in The Incubator. Lesson projects within the Incubator are subject to The Carpentres Code of Conduct.

Lessons can be proposed for addition to the Incubator via issues on the Incubator Proposals repository. Proposals can be made for brand new lessons, in which case The Carpentries team will create a new lesson repository for you, and for existing lessons to be transferred into the Incubator. Learn more about proposals and requirements for inclusion in The Carpentries Incubator.

If you are thinking about starting to develop a new lesson, we recommend participating in Collaborative Lesson Development Training.

The Carpentries Incubator is a great place for lessons that are in active development. When a lesson approaches stability/maturity, the authors may wish to submit it to The Carpentries Lab and/or for adoption as an official Carpentries lesson.

1. The Carpentries Lab: the Lab is a space for stable community-owned lessons that have passed through peer review. Lessons can be submitted to the Lab, where they will undergo a process of open peer review, receiving feedback from other members of the community. After reviewers have approved a lesson for acceptance into the Lab, the lesson repository will be transferred and configured to reflect its new status.
2. Lessons developed in the Incubator can also be considered for adoption as a new lesson for one of The Carpentries existing lesson programs (currently, Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry). Decisions on adoption of a new lesson are taken by the Curriculum Advisors and/or Governance Committees of the lesson program in question. We recommend contacting these decision-making bodies early in the lesson development process to discuss this possibility, as members of these governance groups may be able to provide valuable advice and guidance about how a lesson could be designed to best fit into the existing lesson program.

Lesson developers retain full control of their lesson repositories in the Incubator and can transfer their projects out of the Incubator at any time.

Please contact The Carpentries Curriculum Team with your questions about The Carpentries Incubator.