Phase 1: Community Research - Learning About The Turing Way

[aleesteele]

NOTE: This issue is a work in progress. Language, wording, questions, and content may change in the coming weeks.

Community Research: Learning about The Turing Way

Summary

Over the next number of months, my aim is to get to know The Turing Way community, and the Turing Way project. Because I’m a relative newcomer into the world of open science, this means that I'm not only trying to learn about how and why people contribute to the The Turing Way… but also how and why people participate in open science more broadly.

From this project, I hope to develop methodologies and ways of working that could be applicable in other contexts and with other communities (open or closed?). You will hopefully be able to find some of these resources in either the open community building repo (a kind of meta-team at the Alan Turing Institute, composed of other community managers like me!) or in the personal repo I'm making for this project.

What is community research?

Community research is much like research with people more broadly, but perhaps with certain, specific foundations: to start by working with communities and putting their knowledge first. Instead of approaching TTW deductively, it aims to be inductive. Some have called it community-based participatory research, comunity network research, community research, research ops or ethnography.

Research Plan

This part is still in process, but here's a rough outline of how I've been trying to learn about TTW. I'm taking it slow - talking with people who have been a part of a project, with an (ambling) aim to learn about a few things (for example):

• Why did you join the Turing Way?
• What did/do you work on? How did you work on it?
• What role has TTW played for you in your [research/industry/policy/other]? Open science more broadly?
• What other open projects are you involved in? What can TTW learn from those projects?

Ultimately, I'm asking myself: how can I support you and your work?

Timeline

Still in progress

• Reach out to core contributors for initial conversations
• Reach out to collaborators in the open science network

Who can help?

• Are there people that I should speak to? Projects I should be aware of? Let me know!
• Does this framework work? How do you think it could improved?

Sources:

This study aims to be something we can build together, and builds upon the work of similar efforts. This list is ongoing - please feel free to share other resources!

• For my graduate studies - I spent about a year and half learning about the OpenStreetMap community, an open source mapping projects, in particular learning from the Community Working Group team at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. The HOTOSM community has done a lot of research that could be help us to learn more about ours. See examples in OSM diares here and here (2021) /
• Open Heroines, a group that aims to amplify the voices of women and non-binary people in tech, has also done a kind of 'community research' study, which we could draw from (2020)
• Simply Secure, a group that develops resources on ethical/privacy-focused practices for technology developers, released a report called "What Does a Community Need?" in 2021. It has important information about how remote conferencing has changed communities, which particularly applies to a global project like TTW (2021)
• Nadia Eghbal, a researcher and writer about open source, wrote a report called "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" for (2016) and published a book called "Working in Public: Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (2021) about the labor behind open source software
• "Two Bits" by Chris Kelty (2008) and "Coding Freedom" by Gabrielle Coleman (2014) are ethnographies about the free software and hacker movements, respectively.
• Mozilla's UX team has done a number of studies on and with its large community
• Ford Foundation's "Critical Digital Infrastructures" research stream has a number of projects and topics that may be applicable to TTW community

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last updated: 2 April, 2022

[aleesteele]

Update 1: 8 April, 2022

Heya everyone!

My goal is to update you all at least once a week on my venture into 'community research'. This is the first update... so here goes nothing!

I've been lucky enough to attend Collaborations Workshop this week, hosted by the Software Sustainability Institute. The SSI supports the development and use of software within research, and it is a close ally of The Turing Way project, with much overlap between the two. In fact, a glimpse at our Contributors page shows just how many contributors to TTW have been SSI fellows (past and present).

This week, I learned that SSI was integral in the institutionalisation of the Research Software Engineer role. The role has long existed in a variety of different forms – but at a Collaborations Workshop in 2012 – the role RSE was coined, and it has since been institutionalised across the UK and farther afield.

So in many ways: this week has been focused less on TTW more specifically, but how it fits into the ecosystem of many other projects and organisations in the world of open science (which extend into other 'open' worlds like infrastructure, software, data, and governance). Doing so is helping me to figure out what questions I should ask of TTW community members, people in open science more broadly, and also people who really haven't worked with/in the open space at all.

This is very much a work in progress, but here's a web of how I've tried to understand the web of actors in open science so far. There's really no structure to it yet:

Many of the people I've spoken to have been involved in one or more of the projects mentioned above. The more I speak to people -- the more I hope I'll be better equipped to draw pathways between different projects, and the people that have formed those bridges. Mapping these pathways is particularly important because it helps us to answer questions like the ones I'd written about above, such as:

• Why and how do people get involved in open science, and in projects like The Turing Way?
• How do they get involved, and what tools do they use?

Over the past week, I've been able to hone down perhaps a bit more on specific sub-questions – specifically as they apply to TTW. For the first: events (like conferences or group trainings) and personal connections have emerged as the primary ways of bringing people into the TTW community. For the second, there also seem to be clustors of tools that either enable participation (open infrastructure or workflow tools) or make it more difficult (for social OR technical reasons).

If you're thinking that this seems obvious... you're right! But hopefully teasing out the specifics will help me understand where and how I can support people more effectively.

NOTE: I'm definitely not the first one to be asking these sorts of questions, of course. Much of this work – as it applies specifically within TTW or in other open source projects, has already been written about by many other people within many other projects. See 'References' for some of the work I've been building upon and using as a reference below (in progress).

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The role of events and structured programs in open science & TTW

One thing that's become clear to me is just how integral events and structured programs are to introducing people into open ways of working, and to open science more generally. These events and programs, alongside the ensuring organisations that people have joined in turn seemed to be linked, at least in the conversations that I've had so far. I've started to map out some of the ones that have been mentioned by people I've spoken to. This graph is far from complete --- and it's something I'll be adding to in the coming months:

There are sub-questions to be asked here, a few listed below?:

1. Why these events/programs, and what do these events/programs have in common?
2. What do people learn at these events and within these programs? What happens when they end?
3. Who do these events and programs not reach? Who is left out of the conversations had in these spaces?

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Using personas to understand how/why people contribute

Because I'm still very much at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to talking to people in the community, I've spent much of this week trying to understand how other groups have thought about and conducted research with/within their communities.

Drawing from studies into open source, open research, and others, I've started to learn a lot more about the notion of 'personas', which are 'types' of people or characters that might in engage in your work. They're a combination of real and imagined, but help you to keep the priorities of these people in mind when you're building a project, or in my case, 'managing a community'.

Some of the personas I drew from were the Open Heroines community study, Open source personas from Mozilla, Simply Secure's wealth of resources on personas in open source, studies of open source contributor personas, Bessemer Ventures's work, Ben Balter's work at GitHub... and of course the chapter we have in the Turing Way.

While TTW has already developed 'personas' for contributors to the project, hopefully this community research will be able to build upon and expand this work.

A few more sub-questions have emerged from this landscape-mapping:

1. Are the pathways for contribution clear for people entering the project NOT from either events (i.e. the Bookdash) or personal connections (who might help them with initial engagement)?
2. Are there actors missing from this map? Other personas? Other pathways?
3. How can we make space for the creation of more personas/pathways, while leaving upon perhaps more established modes of contribution?

One thing I'll add is that The Alan Turing Institute now has a dedicated "community" of "community managers" that has emerged in the past number of months. This crew (@arronlacey @AyeshaDunk @EKaroune @RaoOfPhysics @vhellon - led by @malvikasharan) have been building upon and contributing to TTW long before I got here... And so this likely affects the web of personas listed above. Hoping to develop this in the coming months.

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Understanding the open infrastructure behind open science

This is perhaps the least developed update so far – in no small part because it's the part of open science that I know the least about. This web is still very much in progress, as it doesn't highlight certain workflows within data science or other computational environments that would draw directly from TTW. I'll be working more on this vein in the coming weeks, but a few initial questions:

1. Within computational research environments, what tools are people using most frequently? Does TTW cater to those workflows - the assumptions for use that accompany them?
2. What software and packages are missing from this graph? Who creates them + maintains them, and do they overlap with open science?
3. How can TTW highlight the infrastructure role of these projects, which TTW benefits from - but may be more invisible to "non-technical" readers of TTW?

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Resources

Note: the citations are included ab cited above, but need to add the links in below

last updated: 8 April, 2022

[aleesteele]

Update 2: 15 April, 2022

Hello! Can't believe I'm already coming up on the second community research update. This has been my favorite part of the week - because it means I get to reflect on the conversations I'm having with people within the community (and also outside of it).

My web is starting to look a bit more filled out these days, but in ways I didn't expect. I ended up spending most of of my week talking to people within the Alan Turing Institute that work with or contribute to TTW in one way or another, which lead to a kind of "sub-web" of actors and organisations that may be one step removed from TTW or Open Science, but have supported the project in different ways. In many ways however, this resulted in feeling like I've somehow neglected our community in the process (I'll talk a bit more about what I mean below).

**Just flagging here that @malvikasharan and I have also been co-working on governance issues over at @open-life-science which is definitely feeding into this community research and vice versa. We also started prep work for the upcoming Fireside Chat, which we've planned for 29 April on remote conferencing as the international default, and I'm been working on the April 2022 newsletter. Stay tuned for both of those!

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Updates to key questions in TTW

One thing I've been struggling with is jumping between the broader community research aims of this project, and the practical ways of implementing findings from it. For example: we can think more broadly about the openness of the community, pathways for engagement, etc... but what does this translate into in real time? I built upon the key questions from the original Research Plan and Update 1 with a few more 'concrete applications', which you can see below. This is a work in progress, and it still seems a bit amorphous at the moment.

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Translating The Turing Way and the role of language & localisation in open science

Over the past few weeks, I've also had the opportunity to speak to a few people (shout out to @BatoolMM & @acocac !) that do the difficult work of translation of The Turing Way. The sheer amount of work they do is amazing, and while I'm going to be woefully incomplete in my description of their work: I'll give it a shot.

The language gap of the internet more broadly is huge, with the vast majority of work happening in English (and not in the over 700 languages spoken in the world at large). In data science, research, and science more broadly, this is overwhelmingly the case as well (case in point: programming itself is English-centric!). This has massive implications, but a number of projects that have emerged to address this problem is growing. Localisation, which takes this process a step further into adapting for local cultural contexts across the world (language being the first step) is the evolution of this imperative.

With respect to The Turing Way: this means that for the vast majority of its history, the resources have been available only for English speakers & readers. But that is changing. The group of people who have come together to translate this work are operating in Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese. Accompanying them are emerging ways of doing translation and localisation more broadly within open science that hopefully we can support along the way. Very much thinking about how this can be done in real time, but here's some of my 'visual notes' so far.

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The Turing Way Core team: mapping institutional engagement

When I first started following TTW more closely in the months before starting, I remember joining a few collaboration cafes and co-working hours, but not knowing exactly where to start or how to contribute. While the space seemed very welcoming, as an outsider with no prior connection to the community, I was (understandibly) intimidated. However, the funny thing about being a new community manager is that I've gone from 'outsider' to 'insider' in approximately... 1 month! In other words: now I have to retrace why I instinctually felt this insider/outsider dynamic, as it may give me insight into what impression TTW gives new contributors.

I say this because the information architecture of feed-based platforms (for example: Twitter and Slack, where a lot of TTW contributors & open science communities interact) perpetually engage with everything in the present tense, which makes it harder to tease out the depth and histories of events/relationships/collaborations/programs that sustain open science (& open source collaboration more broadly). If you're iteracting with a project like TTW without understanding this - you may get the impression (as I did) that it's a closed, or at least a very tight-knit community.

Case in point: The Turing Way is a project that spawns over 300 contributors, multiple continents, and 5 'sub-books'. To many people who have been around since the beginning: it remains a grassroots project, because they have the historical context and personal connections to think of it as such. But to new people (institutional or not): it may seem like a finished, complete project, and a closed community of people who already know each other.

Institutional backstory

This is why I've been reaching into the archives of the project, and am trying to talk to people from its different stages (who may be presently involved or not). The Turing Way was founded by @KirstieJane + others (+ very importantly, with many allies outside of the Institute and in academic institutions around the world). In the years since, the Tools, Practices, and Systems program (where TTW was made & incubated) has expanded significantly, alongside the reach of the project. When @malvikasharan arrived (who now co-leads the project), TTW expanded in many new directions, with questions of governance, diversity, inclusivity, and decentralisation being much more present in the everyday workings of the project, as well as tying it a bit closer to Open Life Science (which she co-founded!) in the process.

I've come onto the team during a new phase: where TPS has expanded to include Research Application Managers, Community Managers, and Program Managers... all of which have some of their time allocated to contribute to The Turing Way. This is research infrastructure in action, and putting some of the practices of openness documented within TTW into the world at large. Inspiring stuff!

Are Turing Way core contributions/contributors changing?

I say all this because on one hand, this is super exciting. It means that there are a lot more people who are paid to support and engage with The Turing Way (spot this 'ways of working' document for the breakdown). The issue of payment and renumerating people's time to contribute to open source projects has a long history. A few examples of writing on the issue:

• https://timlwhite.medium.com/comwhy-you-should-pay-for-open-source-2e268b57e762
• https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open-source-d7cf4568
• https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/
• https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-inequality-pay-editors

However, this also means that there's a whole other dimension to In my web above - where there are certain roles (with associated priorities & aims) that are contributing to TTW AND have institutional affiliation to the Turing, and whose contributions may not be documented in the project as such. Furthermore, these emerging dynamics may affect how contributors, new and veteran, engage with the project. So, I added a few personas and a few follow-up questions:

1. What does contribution to TTW look like for these roles?
2. What is the emerging relationship between Turing-associated roles and non-Turing associated roles? Within the core organising team and in the wider community spaces?
3. How does this affect the perception of non-renumeration within the project, and how can we distribute funding more broadly (given institutional limitations)?
4. How can we help people to receive institutional support to contribute to TTW outside of the Turing Institute? (Shout out to @EstherPlomp - who receives institutional support at TU Delft to contribute to TTW...and essentially created her own job!)
5. How do we better recognise non-written forms of engagement for all personas of the Turing Way (i.e. reviewing PRs, mailing list drafts, organising community events, presenting TTW at conferences?)
6. How does this change how newcomers interact with the project?

What does this mean for community management?

Given the "perpetual present" of digital platforms, and the way in which newcomers will always interact with the project as it is right now, a lot of this history will obviously be lost. And for good reason: there's no need to learn about the context of the whole project if you're interested in a particular part. Learning is slow, and takes time. In the context of community-building however, it does play an important role... because it feeds into what I'd ultimately only felt on an emotional level: that insider-outsider dynamic. This is something I'll be keeping in mind over the coming months, but these were my thoughts so far.

Quite a long update this week - but congrats if you made it all the way to the end!

[aleesteele]

Update 3: 22 April, 2022

This week I started to be a bit more specific - and tried to take some of these broader learnings about the project into more specific ideas of how to improve different parts of it.

This meant trying to understand more specifically what tools people are interacting with at every stage, both when they're first exposed to the project OR joining the community for the first time (which may be mutually exclusive)... as well as keeping track of what people ACTUALLY do when they're a bit more comfortable with contributing.

In other words, I've been focusing on what people interact with in real time, teasing out if there are things that are confusing or difficult to use... and if there's something I can do to decrease "friction" so to speak.

Mapping engagement with TTW

This graph is a bit more structured than my previous ones, and I think things are starting to make a bit more sense. There's a bunch of tools that people are interacting with, but a couple are sticking out. Aside from the Book itself, Github, Slack, Twitter and HackMD are the most common tools that the community uses for drafting issues, community meetings, sharing information, and all sorts of things.

In the coming weeks, I'll dive more specifically into what can be done to think more about these tools, but here's the beginning of that process:

Book:

• For new people to the book, are they prone to read the "Community Handbook" when they don't feel like a part of the community?

Related issues:

• Add an image to the **Welcome** page #1877
• [Invitation] Don't know where to get involved in The Turing Way? - specific project ideas for new and existing contributors #1712

Github:

• CONTRIBUTING.d: is the pathway to the doc clear? Is it linked in the appropriate places? Is there another location that the content should be based?
• Issue templates: Are they clear enough to be used without explanation? Is there other/less/more information that should be used?

Related issues:

• Update the Current Set of Issue Templates #1598
• The “issue template” link is broken in the contributing page #846

Slack:

• Do people know how to get started, blind-joining the slack?
• Do people feel welcome in the main channels of slack? (i.e. bots?)
• How to people go from Slack to Github?
• Do people know about upcoming events, if they were only a part of the Slack?

Related issues:

• Swap gitter links to Slack links in welcomebot and issue template list #1724

HackMD

• Do beginnings/newcomers to the community know how HackMD works?
• Do they know which links to use and when?

Related issues:

• Update HackMD link in the collaboration cafe #2057

Mapping contribution to TTW

This graph is an example of what the combinations of pathways look like – it's definitely not at all linear. I'll be mapping out more of these pathways as I talk to more contributors, as well as (hopefully) learn more about the translation workflow as well.

Not as big of an update today – but it's a foundation I'll build upon for next week!

[aleesteele]

Adding some mid-week notes on two things I've been exposed to recently via OLS!

Mountain of engagement

As well as this post: https://malvikasharan.github.io/blogs/open-source.nudge/

Open source on-boarding

It's been interesting to realise how much The Turing Way is connected – but is divergent from – the wider world of open source. On-boarding processes for open source may work with coding workflows, or people that are used to open source style contributions... but what about people that don't know how to code? That aren't sure what this workflow (tacit knowledge) is in the first place?

https://opensource.com/article/19/12/open-source-contributors
https://github.com/readme/featured/contributor-onboarding

[aleesteele]

Update 1: 29 April, 2022

I am so sad! Somehow I just lost my draft of this post, so it'll be a bit shorter as I try to summarise what I'd posted before before! That'll show me not to directly draft in Github!

In any case, building off of last week's work, I've honed in on a couple of different things for this week: specifically how to think about the tools that enable participation within a community (which has emerged over the past few weeks of conversations with people), open infrastructure (and the possibility of a rearranged/emergent/new-ish chapter or guide).

Mapping engagement -> learning about tools

Like I said last week: aside from the Book itself, Github, Slack, Twitter and HackMD are the most common tools that the community uses for drafting issues, community meetings, sharing information, and all sorts of things. The Translation team uses Crowdin for their work (recently moved from transifex), and I'll have to speak to them more about the workflow of working with that platform. I tried to map out some of the things mentioned

So, trying to map out some examples of things like github templates, slack welcome messages, slack channels, twitter strategies... all that fun stuff, to see what type of thing might work for not only a project like the Turing Way - but honestly, to see who's left out of these conversations and tools that we're using now.

Here's an example:

Note: There's been a big shift to Mastadon, and I need to investigate it a bit more before adding to this chart! Really important conversations being had in the slack about it

Open infrastructure

Taken from slack: Over the past month+, I've been able to talk with lots of people in open science (and open source more generally) about the importance of 'research infrastructure' - and the tools that scaffold what researchers do. There are bits and pieces that people reference from across TTW to talk about it: from the guide to reproducible research, project design, communication... so it's definitely a reoccurring theme, though not necessarily collected in one space, at least according to everyone I've spoken to. What do we think about a chapter or even guide (bringing in existing work) about "open research infrastructure"?

This is totally emergent. Nothing here yet - but noting that this is developing! A rough idea, have to do some background research and lots of background reading from the lovely people at Invest in Open, Jupyter, and OKF (Frictionless).

Related PRs:

• Chapter proposal: Open Infrastructure #2337 - proposed 'open infrastructure' issue
• Package development section #2297
• Open Access: add more detailed information (colours)? #1944 - open access a part of open infrastructure?
• https://investinopen.org/blog/preliminary-investigation-defining-open-scholarly-infrastructure-comments/
• https://jupyter.org/
• https://frictionlessdata.io/

Usability of TTW

I've been thinking a lot about this during conversations with people over the past few weeks. While I read through the book before starting - was such a massive resource that I don't think I concretely saved (or bits that flew over my head) were lost. Looking through some of the work by the Write the Docs community and this piece by the Simply Secure team on the "UX of Documentation" ... I feel like there's room for me to try to develop a "card sorting" exercise for the community. It might be a way to encourage people to contribute in a different way to the book - not necessariliy through the act of active writing?

Now... going to go climb & off to another long weekend in the UK!

[aleesteele]

Update 6: 6 May, 2022

Community research: 6 weeks on

Hi everyone! I can't believe that this is the 6th week of community research, and that time has sped by so quickly. It's been an incredible pleasure and privilege to speak with many of you (more than 30 lovely people!) during this time, and I have learned an incredible amount about the project, both past and present. I admit, when I'd originally set out on this community research idea, I didn't have a lot of structure in mind except for the general themes listed above. I was hoping that patterns might emerge naturally, and that key questions, tensions, or threads might emerge as well.

In many ways, they have: what began as conversations about why and how people get involved in The Turing Way have become questions about things much bigger than that: what role does open science play within their academic discpline or jobs, the politics of attribution and academic authorship, the importance of contributing upstream to open infrastructure, the need for community support in times of precarity and social isolution... The list goes on. Thank you so much for your time, your thoughtfulness, and trust in speaking with me.

However – a few weeks down the line, I know there have been some things I've gotten wrong along the way. So it's time for a review, a look within, and a little more structure !

Review & Feedback

If you're interested in giving feedback about these community research updates, I've made a little survey where you can share feedback anonymously: https://forms.gle/Tq3n1GwxgEyim4Tf8

Re-reading these updates, I think that there's a number of things to improve upon:

• Recognition: During our 1:1 this week, @malvikasharan brought up something extremely important: that these updates often addressed current or future ideas about the project, often at the expense of recognising the history that enabled it. I'm so glad that she brought it to my attention, as it was something I feared I would do (but ultimately something I did anyway). With every conversation, I've learned about how much the history of TTW (as with many open source projects) emerged from spontanous conversations or collaborations that weren't necessarily documented in public. In the coming weeks and months, I'll try to think through how to recognise these contributions (perhaps outside of or in addition to the Contributors page)– especially as many fall of these contributions outside of the writing kind. This foundational work is extremely imporant to recognise and celebrate, and perhaps some of the most invisible. We wouldn't be here without it! 🎉
• Attribution: Similar to the above, the "Anne's digest" format of these posts often makes it seem like I'm the sole author of this work, which is absolutely not the case. Because they summarized conversations instead of quoting people directly and in their own words, this format has often made it seem like a lightly-informed op-ed, rather than the accumulation of other's thoughtful reflections. Everyone I have spoken to authors of this community research, just as much as myself (as the Turing Way itself is), and I don't think the first few updates reflect that. Should participation in this research be shared on the Contributors page? Should this documentation go into the community handbood? I hope we can brainstorm this together.
• Documentation: I am totally kicking myself that I haven't asked to record anyone's audio or video in lieu of written notes! Instead, I took written notes or typed notes, most of the time. None of these quotes or comments show up directly in these digests, which is probably due to the speed at which they have been released - and it's something I'm going to work directly with people to review, and make sure that any quotes or thoughts I have written down accurately reflect their thoughts about TTW or open research, directly in their own words. These testimonials are precious work, and I want to make sure to archive them in whatever way people feel comfortable.

Next steps

I'm not sure if these updates will happen every week or every other week, but I want to make sure that I take the time to reflect on all these conversations with people in the people, ensure everyone has attribution (in the form that they would like), and make sure the documentation is accurate and done according

• Templating future community research updates (key highlights, quotes, ideas, histories)
• Think through attribution methods for community research (with help, of course!)
• Review coffee chats/interviews
  - [ ] Clean up coffee/interview notes
  - [ ] Follow up with people about preferred attribution ❤️
  - [ ] Review notes, follow-up historical survey (? pending)
  - [ ] Publish as needed/wanted/desired
• Clean up miroboard (or convert to csv file) to better log histories of the project: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVODKfyGw=/?share_link_id=616570927084

[aleesteele]

Posting this update as a holding space for reformating/summarizing previous research, included above.

[aleesteele]

Update 7: 13-05-22

Feedback survey: https://forms.gle/Tq3n1GwxgEyim4Tf8

Trying out a community research update template!

Hello, world! I've spend this week beginning to transition away from the more unstructured parts of community research into more specifically trying to develop models and meta practices that can be used by others. This first attempt at a weekly update is modeled off of IOI's "What we are working on". Let me know what you think, and don't forget to fill out the feedback survey above 😄

Research thread updates

With these threads emerging most prominently from community research, I thought I would talk about each of them individually, and the steps being taken to learn more & act on these threads.

• Open infrastructure: commented on Chapter proposal: Open Infrastructure #2337 with background about the topic within TTW.
• Attribution: thinking through network diagrams, and a way of putting these conversations into a more official update (perhaps as something to be logged within the community handbook?).
• Feeding research back into TTW: Finally starting this process next week!
• Mapping contribution workflows: Would like to flag this for people at book dash next week, to begin this process. Need to create a template of things to look for.
• Mapping engagement: Consistently taking notes, but will reiterate these maps after bookdash.
• Personas: Same as above, will reiterate after bookdash.

Conversations

This is just a summary of this week, but I've added in a post above that I plan to fill out with conversations had in previous weeks, and with conversations from previous weeks.

• Emma Karoune & Malvika Sharan: about open governance plans for TTW, and the mountain of engagement as it relates to the project during the OLS-5 meeting.
• Patricia Heterich: about the history of The Turing Way (the very beginning), the origins of the open science movement, and her own entry point into open science.
• Rachael Ainsworth: Talking through the evolution of open science, discussing the history and role of the SSI fellows program, how community building online has changed during the pandemic
• Callum Mole: On the role of RSE's within the Alan Turing Institute, the importance of research infrastructure, and changing relationship with research
• Giulio Coppi: concerns and practices about use of AI in the humanitarian sector, reproducible research, what research looks like the humanitarian sector vs academic science

Reading / Watching

• "Design justice: community-led practices to build the worlds we need": https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/43542/external_content.pdf?sequence=1
• "Data maintenance as a form of care": https://twitter.com/aleesteele/status/1525047942771576832
• The REF is dead, long live the REF: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-ref-is-dead-long-live-the-ref/
• Various bits and bobs on networks and attribution (more on this next week!)

Upcoming tasks

Continuing tasks the above, with a focus on asking for permission to publish more openly, sharing notes for review, and mapping out trends from quotes.

[aleesteele]

Update 7: 20-05-22

Feedback survey: https://forms.gle/Tq3n1GwxgEyim4Tf8

Book dash week + community share-outs!

What a crazy week! It was Book Dash – which has remained one of the big pieces missing from the giant puzzle that is TTW, and the one I was most excited to experience. The event was a crash course in contributing to The Turing Way, and learning how people contribute to the project and why. It takes an immense amount of planning – and a huge amount of work on the part of the Organising Committee.

There's something really special about these spaces, that has me questioning a lot of what I've been taught to believe about online events–– particularly when it came to cultivating vulnerability and the creative space needed to write/contribute/edit/brainstorm together. I've been learning a lot from the organising team about what this means for hybrid events - which is already starting to be documented at #2359.

Just a note, but I also gave a short presentation about this research push at the Community Share-outs, with the slides available here. The most important slide is this one, capturing just a few of the people (I've probably missed many!) who have given their time to me over the past few months. This research is a collective product of the brains of you all!

Research thread updates

Updates on supporting these threads

• Open infrastructure: the momentum is building! Updates to the open infrastructure chapter are being developed by @JimCircadian at [WIP] Write Open infrastructure chapter #2407, with conversations taking place soon with the IOI & Jupyter teams.
• Attribution: will post a few brain-storming exercises on monday regarding networks, but otherwise need to work on Capturing The Turing Way's use/reuse/sharing/impact stories from our users, readers, contributors and collaborators #1659! The network ideas are more nascent, with the first priority being getting people's testimonies & notes back to them for review!
• Feeding research back into TTW: Didn't start this week! Next week!!
• Mapping contribution workflows + engagement: People have been doing this all week at Book Dash May 2022: Capturing contributor workflows #2364 + Capturing Book Dash Participant's information in the contributors file #2189.
• Personas: No updates!
• Events: Documenting book dash! --> forthcoming brainstorming chart coming at some point next week.

Conversations

This is a summary of conversations had throughout the week:

• Esther Plomp: About the need for ethics in data management, which became a wider conversation about the legacy of unethical behavior in our respective disciplines (this and this most recently)
• Patricia Heterich: During Book Dash, Patricia facilitated an open conversation about open infrastructure, grounded in her own story and experiences that lead to many others sharing her own - so needed
• Alejandro Coca-Castro and Anne Fouilloux: Was witness to their conversation about where to put their research objects chapter - a magical experience
• Jez Cope: [double-checking summary]
• Camila Rangel Smith: Regarding the history of translation within The Turing Way, and how the team has evolved over the years
• Hari Sood: New Research Application Manager (RAM) on the team. We spoke about sustainability in OpenStreetMap and open source software more broadly
• Carlos Martinez-Ortiz: On the evolution of open science, and negotiating disciplinary tensions between different aspects of the FAIR principles

Reading / Watching

• "The Ladder, The Sphere, and the Rhizome": https://www.noemamag.com/the-ladder-the-sphere-and-the-rhizome/
• https://www.researchobject.org/ - Learning about research objects during Book Dash!
• Re-reading The Turing Way right now, with the notes from the above in mind...

Upcoming tasks

• Sending updated notes & transcripts to everyone I've spoken to so far -
• Invite interviewees to share their testimonies in The Turing Way, asking if they'd like to use the notes I'd taken as a starting point

[aleesteele]

Update 8: 27-05-22

Feedback survey: https://forms.gle/Tq3n1GwxgEyim4Tf8

NOTE: Next week is a short week for the UK, so the next update will be on 10 June!

Organising + Open infrastructure (definition) building

This week has been more focused on building my own internal project management systems, planning for some upcoming events/talks, book dash reviews, planning for the first core team meeting, and starting the documentation process for community research within TTW. These are multi week/month processes, so I'll be working with Malvika to develop a plan of doing this publically!

One thing that really struck me about book dash was the importance of thinking not only about processes, but the type of community spaces needed to enable collaborative work, and the psychological safety needed to enable connection in more informal ways. Given the hybrid ways of working - and widespread digital burnout many have reported feeling, this is going to be a challenge, but an important one to acknowledge if we can continue to support researchers and practitioners in contributing to the project. One thing that I keep learning from more experienced members and leaders in the project (and through Open Life Science) is the importance of mentoring people, and passing on the knowledge you have to others.

In conversations with people now, I'm field-testing a lot of concepts and ideas that have emerged over the past two months of research, to see how they track with all sorts of people in open science and otherwise:

• Does this 'wiki' image work as a description for TTW, especially for people not necessarily familiar with Github?
• What do the FAIR principles and/or reproducibility look like in different disciplines?
• How has the open science movement changed over time?
• What is clear or unclear about the current processes? Events?
• Wider adoptability of open science principles?
• What is the lifecycle of research and what technical and physical infrastructure does it require?
• Where is power centralised in these processes?

In terms of processes:

• How can we create more intentional spaces for people to work on Turing Way-related things in a way similar to Book Dash? (re-visiting existing events, and seeing what needs to be done? What rituals are needed for this to happen?
• Where is documentation clear/not clear? (Planning for "Github Fridays" to focus on this element, if only for my own workflow... and inviting others to come along if they'd like!)
• Can we connect the conversations happening on Slack to the ones happening on Issues or PRs? (Possible solutions to test: adding github updates to Slack, )
• How can we go to spaces where these conversations are already happening, and learn from the expertise of others? (Ideas for future fireside chats): sustainability in open source, defining "open infrastructure" in different contexts
• What are the feedback systems needed to ensure that decisions are made collectively when needed, and quickly if trialing?

Task updates

This doesn't feel as necessary as a category - especially because a lot of updates are available directly in weekly notes in the open community building repo.

Conversations

This is a summary of conversations had throughout the week:

• Isabel Sargent and Mel Marochov: Talking through an upcoming workshop at Ordnance Survey, and about both institutional and project ethics
• Dustin Carlino: OpenStreetMap, the tech company to civic tech pipeline
• Emma Karoune: The publishing/research process, and the pressures for
• Jennifer Ding: Acknowledgement in technical projects as opposed to narrative building work in NLP and emerging technologies more broadly
• Vicky Hellon: Preparing for a collective presentation, thinking through the 'wiki' way of talking about The Turing Way, and pathways for engaging with the project
• Open Community Building Group + Whitaker Lab: Strategies for slack engagement and ways of considering open & closed projects more broadly
• Cassandra Gould van Praag: The development of open science, neuroimaging and reproducibility, and building institutional practices that enable hybrid work

Reading / Watching

• Innovations in Scholarly Communication: https://101innovations.wordpress.com/
• https://openknowledge.community/
• https://sorse.github.io/
• Re-reading The Turing Way right now, with the notes from the above in mind...

Upcoming tasks

• Sending updated notes & transcripts to everyone I've spoken to so far (still combing through notes!) - still in the process of reviewing notes!
• Invite interviewees to share their testimonies in The Turing Way, asking if they'd like to use the notes I'd taken as a starting point - need to do the above first!

[malvikasharan]

Just leaving a message to thank you for continue to post updates from your community research in The Turing Way. I look forward to reading them every Friday -- another tradition/ritual added to The Turing Way 🎊 (Anne I had were talking about Priya Parker's book called "The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.", that emphasises on creating connections through meaningful "rituals")

[aleesteele]

Update 9: 10-06-22

Governance! Project Management! Small updates!

Apologies to anyone reading! So, I lied about having a substantive community update for this week. Got a little caught up in planning the first core team meeting and catching up on some outstanding things from last week (last week being the short week it was). Still developing these project management frameworks and roadmaps in public, and thinking through the processes that might prevent collaborative practices (github <> slack being one example).

Project Management

What does organising/supporting/coordinating/"management-in-public" look like for an open source/research/scientific community like The Turing Way? Developing a system for myself that keeps things in public as much as possible, more miro illustrations of this next week.

Governance updates

Today was our first core team meeting, what a treat! These conversation happened in a closed setting, to allow for more candid conversations and initial planning, so I'll be talking about this in a bigger picture way in the coming weeks. It's important to note that 'core' is just a proxy term: it's really the current group of people that are taking on coordinating or organisational roles within the project in the present.

Conversations

• RightsCon: tuned into many conversations this week about open infrastructure, digital rights and many topics in the orbit of TTW (if not in the shared orbit of values)
• Dustin Carlino, Achintya Rao, Jennifer Ding: Planning for a 'mapathon' event for the AI for Science and Government group. Been learning a lot from this crew about event-planning in academic contexts!
• Eirini Zormpa: Reproducibility in the psychology and across disciplinary domains
• Min RK, Sarah Gibson & Arielle Bennett: Jupyter and an upcoming Binder Community Engagement panel.
• Stephen Haben & Alden Conner: Domain-specific applications of The Turing Way, Reproducibility in the context of the energy sector
• Dan York: legacy systems of internet connectivity
• Richard Dunks: Publishing pipelines, open data & the open ecosystem more broadly, growth stages for open source projects
• Emma Karoune: Finishing OLS-5! Reflecting on the past few months, and progress on the governance topic
• Esther Plomp, Sophia Batchelor, Hari Sood: submission for CarpentryCon discussions

Reading / Watching

(Quite an assortment of things: recommendations from people on various subjects this week!!)

• "101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: how researchers are getting to grip with the myriad new tools": https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101-innovations-in-scholarly-communication/
• Connecting the Knowledge Commons — From Projects to Sustainable Infrastructure https://books.openedition.org/oep/8999?lang=en
• https://chelseatroy.com/2018/04/05/how-do-we-make-remote-meetings-not-suck/
• https://www.andrewblum.net/tubes-2
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVC3E16FCrk
• https://slate.com/technology/2016/05/getting-chills-when-listening-to-music-might-mean-youre-a-more-emotional-person.html

Ongoing tasks

• Still in the process of reviewing notes to send to people (to use as they wish, for a case study or otherwise)
• Planning roadmap for project management
• Planning small working group to review PR

[aleesteele]

Update 10: 17-06-22

Planning for the working group:

I'll be focusing on three communication technologies for the working group: Slack, Github, and HackMD. They seemed to be used most frequently by these communities, but the relationship between the two is sometimes unclear. The goal, as documented in this issue is to understand, tease out, and contribute to the ease of use between these three tools in particular (to add or decrease friction/

Project Management

Using a combination of Trello and Github projects to reviewing existing pull requests and issues within the project.

Conversations

• Lots of conversations had an Connected Life this week, a conference I was lucky enough to attend! (EDIT: you can learn more on this issue)
• Claudia Fischer: learning about connections with The Turing Commons team
• Anne Pasek: From the Low Carbon Methods team, learning about low-grade ways of investigating questions of academic contribution, illustrating through
• Vicky Nash: on the politics of sovereignty, connectivity, and how community-led projects can bridge the gap

Ongoing tasks

• Still in the process of reviewing notes to send to people (to use as they wish, for a case study or otherwise)... slow going!
• Roadmap: reviewing github repository, working groups, slack workspace, etc

[aleesteele]

Update 11: 24-06-22 to 08-07-22

_Note: This summary was written after the fact, to account for research efforts done during this period. _

Task updates

• Hosted the June fireside chat about experiences within THe Turing Way community
• Researching working group organis

Conversations

• Arielle Bennett: Coordinating overlapping calls with The Turing Way and within the Alan Turing Institute
• Andrea Sanchez Tapia: About open research, The Turing Way, and the role of language and culture in the development of science
• Translation team!: about the translation team governance processes, the translation team workflow
• UNESCO open science call meetings
• Jennifer Ding: About submitting The Turing Way to a working group with Mozilla on Open AI
• Rose Payne: Internet infrastructure
• Bridget Nea, Andrea Kocsis, Mishka Nemes: a peer mentoring programme that uses materials from The Turing Way
• Sarah Nietopski, Paz Bernaldo: Developing a MOOC using materials from Open Life Science and
• Claudia Fischer: Finding connections between The Turing Way and The Turing Commons community
• Hari Sood: qualitative coding methods
• Laura Acion, Nicolas Palopoli: governance within The Turing Way (updates that may be useful for the Metadocencia community)

Reading & Watching

• https://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2022-07-07-ethical-considerations-your-open-source-governance
• https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

[aleesteele]

Update 12: 29-08-22

Hey all! I've been on leave for the past few weeks – visiting family and loved ones. 😄 Restarting these in full this week, using this template update! It's busy a busy one, catching on things and prepping for the July Fireside chat (and recovering from a bout of foodsickness). I'll also be backlogging some previous research updates, listed above next week.

Not a lot of topical updates for this week, more focused on planning/catching up. However, I've been thinking a lot about "tech debt" in the context of scale, given the conversations that will be had about it today. How can we alleviate it? What can we do about it? Governance has a lot of potential answers to these questions, but it's again, a tension between speed and inclusivity.

Conversations

• Patrick Mineault, Geoffrey Kateregga, Selene Yang, Alycia Crall: co-planning the conversation around the fireside chat, and shared topics, overlaps and interests
• Marie Nugent, Jennifer Ding, Eirini Zormpa, Claudia Fischer, Zaynab Ismail, Lucy Killoran, Hari Sood: Communities of practice, skills and training discussion
• Zeynep Engin: social movements and their growth vs size
• Paz, Sarah Nietopski, Chloe Poon: OLS and Turing MOOC
• Hari Sood: planning for CarpentryCon sessions

Reading & Watching

• https://wellcome.org/what-we-do/our-work/research-culture
• https://twitter.com/reschangenow/status/1374285181792755716
• https://pmioman14.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/influence-sphere1.jpg
• https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/zeynep-tufekci-protests.html
• https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02347-9
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852813
• https://www.cold-takes.com/nonprofit-boards-are-weird-2/
• https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(21)00074-0/fulltext
• https://xcorr.net/2021/03/25/building-neuromatch-academy/

Ongoing tasks

• Revisiting these ongoing tasks in the following week: prepping for a "Maintenance week" scheduled for August

[aleesteele]

Update 13: 05-08-22

These updates are restarting in full! The more I've learned about The Turing Way as a project, the less I've focused on the actual architecture of the book (which is extremely important - if not pretty radical 😉) and what is needed to write the guides in the first place. Also, as the pace of work has picked up a bit, this has come at the expense of documenting my process for and with the wider community.

Revisiting project infrastructure

I'm coming up on 5 months with The Turing Way project and community. It's been SUCH a huge learning experience on so many levels - and often quite overwhelming! There's so much I don't know about the world of open science (let alone the wider space of research infrastructure!), and every day I feel like I'm introduced to some aspect of it that I didn't know about previously. Hopefully these research updates are valuable in their candidness, and in highlighting that there's a lot that I don't know.

With this in mind, I'm restarting this documentation push in order to document the push into understanding, evaluating, and testing changes within the project architecture as it is:

• Project architecture/infrastructure: Github repository
• Communication channels (HackMD, Twitter,
• Events (community calls, fireside chats, workshops, conferences)
• Decision-making/governance infrastructure

Project Governance update:

Research into governance within The Turing Way is ongoing and happening all the time! I'll add more on this at a later date, but at the moment, this is what is emerging:

The translation team walked me through their drafted governance structure and operating structures a few weeks ago, which was extremely helpful for thinking through how we might be able to better support their work, and how they've essentially created a parallel workflow to The Turing Way project more broadly. We also had a very fruitful folks from Metadocencia and rOpenSci about their emerging governance issues, and shared concerns about the process!

We have our 3-month check-in for the core team meeting in September, where I'll be proposing and thinking through this idea together with them. The four categories on the right have emerged through 1:1 conversations, and drawing upon threads that people are interested in pursuing. The hope is that the coordinating roles for this work can be helped/hosted by paid organising staff, though any community member should be able to participate. From this test, decision-making processes might emerge naturally and the feedback loops start to be documented.

Project Architecture: Github

Out of all the infrastructural-elements of the project, I am revisiting Github first: in part because its uses have expanded dramatically even in the time that I've been here! Github is the central hub for public documentation within (and about) the project. The book is hosted here, along with information about most other aspects of the project as well.

There are many aspects of the project that are hosted on issues within the repository: from events, to project governance, workshop information, to project infrastructure:

Another example here:

Because all of these issues, often infrastructural elements (that keep the ), as well as contributions to the book itself might get lost, as well as new additions to the book itself:

The question that emerges from this naturally is: should The Turing Way be turned into its own organisation - so that some of this work can be divested elsewhere?

Conversations

• Rayya El Zein: planning for the upcoming Fireside chat in August
• Marie Nugent: on open community building, the tension between research and activism, and our own experiences with open research
• Hari Sood and Sophia Batchelor: planning a workshop on using Github
• Alden Conner: on reviewing the promotion pack for The Turing Way, the github repository + maintenance tasks, and developing the working groups
• Open Heroines Lab: the Open Heroines project is starting a series of Labs on topics related to data, feminism, and digital rights. I joined a meeting to learn more about their efforts!

Reading & Watching

• Reviewing "The Art of Gathering" by Priya Parker (Thank you Rayya!)

Ongoing tasks

• Revisiting these ongoing tasks in the following week: prepping for a "Maintenance week" next week !

[aleesteele]

Update 14: 12 August 2022

Maintenance week updates!

This week, Malvika and I have been doing a deep dive into The Turing Way: with a deep dive into what community management might have. @malvikasharan kindly wrote a summary of some of these conversations here, and the themes that have emerged.

• Scaling TTW: The Turing Way from 2020 Vs. The Turing Way 2022 are very different in scale, size and structure -> reflecting on how we scaled, what we did to enable that scaling, what should we do differently as we grow.
• Institutional adoption of Open/Reproducibility: How TTW is trying to institutionalise open and reproducibility practice, why the Turing’s support (national data and AI center) matters, how we continue to work in solidarity with other Open Science projects (as reflected by our friends from the neighbourhood in Fireside chats), how some other orgs have used TTW to enable adoption of best practice and collaboration in their org, what we do next to make this growth ‘less uncomfortable’ (change is hard y’all)!
• Governance: How we have managed participatory process and belonging in TTW, what decision-making process is like so far, how we bring more structure (without losing the emergence and creativity), how our work can further decentralise decision making, how does the current core team (volunteers and staff members) can make the most of their work, what can we do to allow them to work on what they love, what resources we offer to support a governance taskforce in the next months.
• Community Health Report: Anne has met many folks in her 1:1, and wants to use those notes in community health report - thinking like a GP --> how we can approach community health to understand what is good, what are the health indicators. what can be improved etc.
• We also talked about operational tasks, Book Dash, Core Community Meeting, convening community calls for folks who are relatively new, what are some funding proposal we are currently working on, how do we extend our support to other orgs across government+industry, what are some pathways we have built, what needs to improve etc.

Summary of plans:

• Organising the Core Team: we haven't really highlighted this in a public space yet, but The Turing Way core/organising team has grown a lot over the past few months! We're keenly aware that sustainability is an issue for all open source projects (including our own), and that TTW has expanded in many ways over the past 4 years that go beyond writing & reviewing chapters (shout out to the translation/localisation team, as always!). This expansion requires building new ways of organising ourselves to continue on, to enable creative work (like writing chapters about your areas of expertise!), acknowledge everyone's hard work (because open source is hard work!), and sustain new projects we haven't even thought up yet! A lot of this comes down to decentralising our own actions in the leadership team, and the governance structures that enable this. (Hence all the talks about governance, see below! 😄 )
• Project Governance: We had our first core/organising team meeting back in June (the first ever). While the core team has taken many forms over the past few years, this was the first step in building governing structures to the project after so much growth. The second core/organising team meeting will be happening in September, where Malvika and I will share some initial plans + test some organising ideas for the team, which we will make sure to report out to the broader community (you all!!) . You'll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks and months, of course, as we work out what we can do to enable constant feedback. This is a big experiment, so it'll likely take a number of iterations!
• Governance Task Force: In the coming months, we also aim to put together a 'governance task force' that brings together folks from across open projects to discuss issues related to governance, and share best practices between us... more on this very soon.
• Community Health report: As Malvika said, I'll also be working to produce a "Community Health Report" that takes much of the work from Community Research into a more official format... more on this very soon, too! Thanks to everyone who has spoken with me over the past few months. We also aim to make sure there is space to speak to and learn about people who aren't as visible within the community, or who may not feel enabled to contribute. Our health as a community is tied to all of you.
• Community spaces review: In the comings months, we'll also be doing a review of our current community spaces (like Slack, HackMD, Github, etc.). So you'll likely see me popping around the different channels. We'll do our best to build feedback into this process – if you have any suggestions about how to do that please share!

Upcoming plans:

• Will be making the following discussions related to: Core/organising team governance, Governance Task Force, and Community Health Report

Conversations

• Malvika Sharan: planning the maintenance week, reflecting on learnings from the project over the next few weeks
• Alden Conner: Talking about the 'promotion pack' of The Turing Way, running through version
• Sarah Gibson: Adding in github actions to project manage TTW events/talks
• Sophia Batchelor, Hari Sood, Esther Plomp: planning the second version of the CarpentryCon "Git Good" workshop, and hosting it this week!
• Arielle Bennett + Whitaker Lab: Personal ecology, burnout, and learning about what career progression looks like within research infrastructure roles

Reading & Watching

• On Restorative Practices as a method for conflict management: https://creducation.net/conflict_resolution_education_practice_areas/restorative_practices/
• Simply Secure's knowledge management tools (that have a lot of tips for user research and user experience testing!): https://simplysecure.org/knowledge-base/

[aleesteele]

Reviewing 6 months with The Turing Way

It's hard to believe that 6 months have flown by: my first as Community Manager of The Turing Way. During this first push of Community Research, I've aimed to learn about three parts of the project, asking underlying questions that I hoped would enable me to get more familiar with the community, with The Turing Way project, and the norms/values/networks that enable its creation! As I've said in other spaces: I come from different parts of the open ecosystem, so it's been really important to come to this space as a newcomer, to learn more about how what exists and how things are done first before seeing where things could be improved, helped, or brought forward.

• The process of contribution: how does the book come together? How do people collaborate?
• Who contributes to The Turing Way? Who contributes to and builds open science?
• History of TTW & Open Science Movement

With these questions in mind, I'll do a quick review of what I've learned so far.

The Turing Way is evolving as a project, and this evolution requires different structures in order to sustain it moving forward (and acknowledge the power that it now has within the wider space).

The Turing Way started in 2019 as a brain child of Dr. Kirstie Whitaker with her closest allies (within the Alan Turing Institute and in academic institutions around the world), in response to the crisis of reproducibility within science. TTW began as a Guide for Reproducibility. As the project grew into its second phase with Dr. Malvika Sharan, allyships and partnerships began within the wider open science ecosystem, and alongside it, a growth in the number of chapters as well. . This also coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, and digital-first ways of working and collaborating online. Core contributing events for The Turing Way community, like Book Dashes and Collaboration Cafes went completely online: enabling more people to connect and contribute to the project in ways that hadn't been previously possible. The

My arrival onto the team signals a few shifts, within both the project, and the wider landscape of open:

• Growth of the TTW team: growth of paid team members within The Alan Turing Institute who have time allocated for The Turing Way, as documented in the Ways of Working page. With the arrival of new team members, this changes the organisational dynamic of the project in important ways, which is why it
• Institutional power of TTW within ecosystem: The growth of The Turing Way as an institution within the wider open science projects has meant that it has institutional weight (=> power) in important ways, given the amount of time it has been within the wider ecosystem of open science projects (~3+ years at this point!). With this growth has come an increased interest from field-specific or sector-specific expertise want to collaborate with The Turing Way, in the form of shared or collaborative documentation, desires to collaborate, and other structures.
• Institutionalisation of open science and open source: From observing the space, open science appears to be in the process of being more broadly institutionalised, as signified by the increase in foundation funding (Gates Open Research and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Open Science program being two examples), as well as the UNESCO call for open science best practices and NASA TOPS program. The free and open source software movement is also maturing alongside the open science ecosystem, and as such, projects with longer lifetimes are requiring institutional structures (that go beyond the informal ways in which this work has historically happened).
• We cannot and should not ignore the wider social context: People are more broadly attuned to the labor and time required for open source (as shown from works of folks like Nadia Eghbal, and the wider tech labor movement). We exist in times of deepening economic disparity, and widespread precarity and burnout. These contexts are important not to ignore, especially as they seem to be coinciding with a wider growth and expansion of the movement. What can we ask people's time and labor? How can we support them as the requirements and responsibilities grow for all of our collective projects?

With all these things in mind, a couple of things are emerging to both document and address these shifts with The Turing Way as a community and a project

• Formalise governance process: this requires formalising not only the work of working within the paid team, but also within the wider core team, volunteer core team & organising partners, and possible partnership templates that can be used to create partnerships with different groups.
• Formalise onboarding process: and onboarding process: as folks join The Turing Way as either contributors or as paid team members, they are not normally clear as to what steps should be taken, or what responsibilities they might have for joining the project. These are two types of onboarding processes, and are for two different types of audiences.
• Community Health Report: Throughout October and November 2022, I aim to use metrics and ways of working that look at The Turing Way community like a doctor (MP), seeking to diagnose and understand the health of the project and community as it stands. Overall, this speaks to the wider need for documentation of different types besides the book: in the form of reports, papers, blogs, and other forms of media.
• Community audits: Revisit the existing community communication channels, spaces, projects, event programming and other TTW projects to ask the basic questions like: who do they serve? who do they not currently serve? What should be shifted? What can be moved around? Renamed? Refashioned? Pruned?

Balancing the creativity of emergence with the structure required of formalisation is difficult, and while contributions happen in many spaces and in many ways, the book remains the core of the project

I've learned a lot about what contribution looks like within The Turing Way: split between asynchronous writing processes, and condensed periods of time called book dashes. In May 2022, I participated in my first book dash: which is a condensed period of writing like a wikipedia 'edit-a-thon', but for The Turing Way.

I've also learned about the many ways in which folks are a part of the project that go beyond writing chapters: from giving talks, to being involved in the technical infrastructure behind the project, to , and X. Balancing both is important, to leave room for emergence within

A couple of key learnings in this direction:

• Collective documentation is the life blood of The Turing Way, and the practice most important to sustain: Contributing to The Turing Way is centered around collective documentation. In other words the project revolves around contributing to the book. Because of this, there is a need to make the contribution process as easy as possible, and to make it possible for more people to
• Onboarding is a negotiation between emergence and structure: product manager in me wants to find something streamlined: want to contribute to the book? Follow x, y, & z and you'll be able to do so. Want to host a community call? Do a, b, & c. In my own experience, joining a . This is why speaking to the community is so important, because if keeps you from universalising your own perspective. At the same time, this also goes against the principles of emergence that are so integral to TTW as a project, and for creative thinking. It may be that emergence is needed for other collaborations, but onboarding requires structure, allowing for both at the same time.
• Who does the labor of formalisation?: This process takes hard work and navigating through ambiguity! It is something that requires time and effort from folks within the community. The question of who bears the brunt of this labor is always a difficult question, as it usually falls to volunteers. At the same time, folks embedded within organisations also have responsibilities outside of the project, and thereby have a different relationship to open source more broadly when its professionalised. In the context of TTW, we have been trialing what this looks like with the core paid team... And I'm really grateful to the group of folks that have assisted with this work.

The Turing Way does and does not follow other existing understandings of open source projects. and there are things to learn (but also things to not apply!)

• Infrastructure work
• Onboarding to open source ways of working
• Mapping contributors & maintainers

There are many types of contributors to The Turing Way, and I haven't necessarily spoken to all of them.

There are many different types of people who are a part of The Turing Way community (which itself has very loose boundaries with the wider world of open science).
I haven't spoken to many different types of personas within The Turing Way, a few being:

1. The Lurkers: I say 'lurkers' with the utmost respect and admiration, as an avid lurker of many different spaces! These could be folks who are a part of the wider open science ecosystem who are aware of The Turing Way project, graduate students who may know about The Turing Way but may not know where to begin, or other folks who might have heard about the project, but are not sure about joining.
2. Non-open science folks: what keeps you from joining the community of people within open science?
3. More about people who are invisible within the community, and folks who haven't necessarily felt empowered to contribute to the project as is. I'm talking about the lurkers,
4. National-specific networks: bit by bit, I've learned about the nationally-specific networks that sustain open science work in different contexts. National research institutions and funding bodies like UKRI in the UK & others are specific to the national context of the UK, and may not apply elsewhere.

Community Management for The Turing Way takes on particular forms (depending on the stage), and right now it requires a cluster of different skills

I recently made a map of the different types of skills that seemed to be required by a Turing Way community manager, which may (or may not apply) in other contexts. I wonder what it would look like for other contexts - as The Turing Way operates more like an open source CM, rather than a scientific community manager.

Informal networks are important for open science, and projects like The Turing Way (and its peer groups)

If there's anything that I've learned about the many grassroots communities that work in open science, it is that this world is full of interpersonal connections: people who have worked alongside and with each other in a variety of contexts: whether in labs, companies, cooperatives, conferences, computational communities, and many other environments.

This is extremely important, because it means that these networks have enabled and been able to push for change in certain environments because of the strength of these connections.

This of course could lead to other issues, where interpersonal relationships dominate how institutions themselves operate, creating highly political environments rather than meritocratic collaborations.

I have a lot of learning to do about my own process and ways of working out in the open.

I've learned a lot about what motivates folks to get involved with open science, and what projects have emerged in its wake. In the process, I've also learned a lot about what motivates myself: and what I do that is and is not open: despite being an "open community manager".

I'll be continuing to work on how to make my own process as open as possible, without falling subjet to the same traps of openness as a means of contributing to self-surveillance, or openness as a means of contributing to openness for openness' sake (and not as a means to an ends)

This has lead to a couple of initiatives that will be ongoing throughout Autumn 2022:

• Community Gardening: There are a couple of Platform audits, Event review, and other reviewing processes that are planned for the long term
• Continuing to Formalise Governance (working groups, others)
• Planning for additional hubs during the Book Dash

[aleesteele]

This was originally written in a follow up post, but I am adding it here.

6 months as Community Manager of The Turing Way have just zoomed by, and I'm amazed at how much as happened. This also marks a shift of the type of work that I'm aiming to do and steward within the project: from explorative research to practical implementation.

Reviewing 6 months with The Turing Way (see above)

• The Turing Way is evolving as a project, and this evolution requires different structures in order to sustain it moving forward (and acknowledge the power that it has): namely developing processes like governance, operational organisation, and onboarding processes.
• Balancing the creativity of emergence with the structure required of formalisation is difficult, and while contributions happen in many spaces and in many ways, the book remains the core of the project.
• The Turing Way does and does not follow other existing understandings of open source projects, and there are things to learn (but also things to not apply)
• There are many types of contributors to The Turing Way, and I haven't necessarily spoken to all of them (especially the lurkers!).
• Community Management for the Turing Way takes on particular forms (depending on the stage), and right now it requires a cluster of different skills
• Informal networks are important for open science, and projects like The Turing Way (and its peer groups)
• Acknowledgement also extends to the history of the project, and the historical labor and infrastructure that went into building it
• I have a lot of learning to do about my own process and ways of working out in the open (and a lot I've learned from the community).

With this next phase of The Turing Way coming to fruition, the question of what this next phase of the project will look like is a big question.

Planning for Governance Within The Turing Way

• September - December: Trial of working groups
• December - March: Expand working groups for non core team members

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