The Carpentries community of practice started out with a clear goal: teaching foundational computational skills to researchers worldwide. Shared values and goals have long been the starting point of communities of practice as they identify changes they want to see and start working together towards these changes. As a community, The Carpentries are now looking to articulate more closely what these values are and wish the community members to be an integral part of creating these value statements. 

Anyone who is a member of the community, has attended a Carpentry workshop, has gone through instructor training or collaborated with community members in one way or another (on GitHub, in conferences/Hackathons/symposia, etc.) is invited to offer their opinion and contribute to the formulation of community values in The Carpentries by answering these two questions:

1. Envision people you think of as representative of The Carpentries community. What words would you use to describe these people? There is no need to identify them, just briefly outline their characteristics.

2. Workshops, calls, interactions, and guidelines led by The Carpentries are but a few things that make them who they are as a community. With this in mind, in two to three sentences, how would you describe The Carpentries community culture?

Please answer these two questions in any of the following ways:

• respond to this discuss thread on The Carpentries TopicBox, 

• leave comments directly under this issue in The Carpentries Conversations repository, 

• or fill out this Google form anonymously.

About The Carpentries

The Carpentries was formed in January 2018 by formally merging Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. The Carpentries teach researchers the essential computing and data skills needed to do computational or data-intensive research and exist because this type of training is not part of basic research training in most research disciplines, or is pitched at the wrong level wrong level, is not researcher-centric or is hard to access.