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Open Research Community Building at The Alan Turing Institute

Establishing cross-community collaborations and promoting open research in data science

Background

Community building is a process of enabling members in our communities to move from the position of spectators or users to developers and leaders in the project. Community managers and people in similar roles identify and build meaningful pathways for everyone to gain access to the skills and resources they need to participate in the community. Among other project-specific and technical responsibilities, community managers take care of background work needed to make tangible and visible work of their communities effective. These background works involve approaches for collaboration, maintenance, acknowledgement and capturing the impact of community members' work. As the word 'background' suggests, working in community space often stay hidden and hence, can feel unsupported. This is especially challenging when community managers don't have access to an appropriate support system or opportunities to exchange best practices with other community developers.

The Open Research Community Building team at The Alan Turing Institute provides such a space for connection, support and skill-building for the community managers and members working in participatory and community-oriented projects.

the illustration shows three siloed groups of users, researchers and developers, who are connecing with each other based on commonly useful projects.

This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5706310

Open Research Community Building Team

Members of the Open Research Community Building team invest in engaging, training and empowering a diverse group of researchers, research engineers, programme management, and business team members by fostering diverse Communities of Practice through their projects.

Through the active adoption of open research, reproducibility and collaborative approaches primarily drawn from The Turing Way, they contribute toward building interconnected systems of open source software, datasets, communities and processes. The overarching mission is to make research and innovation more efficient and effective across the national and international data science ecosystem for commercial and public interest technologies alike.

Community Managers at Turing

The Turing community managers join the Tools, Practices and Systems (TPS) Research Programme's Open Research Community Building project.

They are assigned to specific projects where they collaborate closely with others and identify where they can surface implicit knowledge and make information explicitly available so that everyone who wants to can participate. As a team, we ensure that the research that happens at the Institute is created to be maintained, sustained, remixed and reused.

People across different communities act as physical bridges between two separate projects and find solutions that are mutually beneficial. There is no replacement of people in technology.

This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5706310

Members

Organiser and Lead

  • Malvika Sharan, TPS Senior Researcher - Open Research

Team Members

  • Achintya Rao, Community Manager; AI for Science and Government Research Programme
  • Arron Lacey, Senior Community Manager; Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases (EDoN)
  • Emma Karoune, Senior Community Manager; RSS Lab and DECOVID
  • Vicky Hellon, Community Manager; Turing-Roche Strategic Partnership

Members from the Collaborating Projects

  • Ayesha Dunk, AI and Data Science Educators Programme, The Alan Turing Institute
  • Sarah Gibson, JupyterHub Community Development Lead, 2i2c and JupyterHub

Guiding Principles

  • Maintain respect, empathy and integrity within the team.
  • Actively identify opportunities for collaboration and applying open research practices.
  • Prioritise diversity, equity and inclusion in all our work.
  • Provide access to resources that empower and enable each other to discover, display and directly use their knowledge and skills.
  • Contribute to the ongoing professional development of team members to maximise their contribution to the team's work, their careers, and open research at large.
  • Create a safe and non-judgemental environment to admit errors and draw learnings from our mistakes.
  • Collaborate with individuals and institutions beyond the team that expand and extend our mission for open research and community building.
  • Be willing to work through conflicts to resolution.

Important Documents for the Team Members

  • Code of Conduct (link will be updated - document currently under review in Pull Request #3): Our Code of Conduct will apply to all activities, documents and communication platforms used by the Open Research Community Building team and related work. Please familiarise yourself with the Code of Conduct, enforcement procedure and help us create a welcoming and safe space for everyone who contributes to the team and this project repository.
  • Project Management: Please find details about how we manage the Open Research Community Building team.
  • Ways of Working: This document describes the structure and organisation of the Open Research Community Building Team, clarifying expectations and support structure to help enable your work. The Turing members should also check the Governance to understand the organisation's structure and policies that apply to them.

Working with The Turing Way

All community managers are onboarded as the core members of The Turing Way. All members of the Open Research Community Building team should take time to learn details in The Turing Way core documents.

Their engagement with The Turing Way project and community should help them understand how they can:

  • enable reproducibility, open communication and ethical research in their projects and Communities of Practice they build.
  • identify people, projects and resources that are crucial for the development, maintenance and sustainability of their projects.
  • interconnect their work with other projects and communities in the wider landscape of data science and open research.
  • facilitate openness, collaboration and transparent reporting, even when not all components from their projects can be made public.
  • find support for their community work and in exchange support others' work, especially when it is closely aligned with their projects.
  • enhance their technical understanding required in their work and share them more widely via The Turing Way (chapters, tutorials, templates or events).

New members and Collaborators

New members or collaborators of the Open Research Community Building team will be onboarded by the project lead and added as a contributor to this project repository. Please create an issue for your induction (if not already created by the project lead).

If you would like to collaborate or connect your project with our work, please contact Malvika Sharan.

License

All content in this repository is openly licensed with a CC BY 4.0, which means you're free to use the materials and remix them so long as you credit the source. More on CC BY 4.0 license can be found at Creative Commons.

Acknowledgement

Our project management documentation and processes are partially derived from "Whitaker Lab Project Management" by Dr Kirstie Whitaker and the Whitaker Lab repository used under CC BY 4.0.