Contributing to CodeRefinery

CodeRefinery is an open-source project. All our work is open, and we accept any type of contributions: there is a lot more than instructing to run a successful workshop. Also, CodeRefinery is really more of a group of like-minded people than one particular plan, so you are welcome to join just to hang out and share ideas.

If you aren’t sure you are ready for more, you can always lurk in the chat (passively watch our community) and become more active when you feel the time is right.

These manuals (and in general, other guides we have) describe the past, not (only) the future. They are made so that new people can know what we typically have done, so they can work on the future (even if it’s different).

A good way to get started is to take the lead of some workshop (doing it like it was before), then do it again with your own improvements.

How to take part

Join the CodeRefinery chat, give comments or submit emoji reactions to show how you feel about things. Many things are announced only through the chat.
Come to our meetings- the monthly community calls are for a broad audience, but anyone is welcome come to the weekly meetings.
Attend a CodeRefinery workshop - they teach the very tools we use to collaborate!

Action: Join our “community teaching training”

CodeRefinery isn’t just about doing teaching ourselves, but improving your teaching. Whether you focus on teaching, or it’s a side-activity to your other tasks, the CodeRefinery (online) teaching can help you avoid re-inventing good practices and prepare you for teaching together.

Action: Advertise and/or help out in our online courses

CodeRefinery runs many open, online courses, which anyone can attend. Some of them can be attended by anyone via livestream, even without registering (yes, this really works - we get high ratings for this). You could simply advertise our courses, or go even further and run local breakout rooms.

Take it a step further and help out with the course, whether it’s as an instructor, helper, or some other role. Of course, anyone is welcome to help, even without advertising the courses!

Read more: Local breakout rooms and Roles overview.

Action: Teach openly and allow others to join

Go to the next level and adopt CodeRefinery strategies for your own courses, so that others can join at little cost to yourself. By opening, you start to find more lesson developers and instructors, so that your courses can reach the next level of quality and impact. Soon, you will wonder why you ever bothered teaching alone.

Other types of contributions

As an open project, there are any number of ways you can contribute:

Take on any of the roles in a workshop - with co-teaching, it is surprisingly easy to go straight to instructor, but there are also many other roles.
Help with lesson maintenance (read and make suggestions) or become a maintainer of a lesson. Watch GitHub repositories to get notified of issues and pull requests, and help review. Anyone can watch any repository, and comments from outsiders do help us review things faster.