Core Team Working Group Trial: Oct 2022-March 2023

[aleesteele]

Summary

From September through December 2022, members of The Turing Way core/organising team will be trialing the development of working groups. These working groups are being established and trialed with three ideas in mind:

1. To operationalise the 10% of working time allocated for paid members of The Turing Way, as documented in the Ways of Working document in The Turing Way repository.
2. To field-test – and help with the codification of – roles that are emerging (or have already emerged) within the wider community, so that others might be able to join in the on the process once it has been established.
3. To alleviate project/technical debt, in order to make contributions (see more about tech debt here and here) for newcomers easier to do.

This trial follows the ongoing discussions on governance within the project (see #2035 and #2036 for details), and will be documented here.

Proposed Format and Groups

• Editors and Reviewers
• Trainers and Mentors
• Infrastructure Maintainers
• Communications on hold/combined with t&m

Will aim to learn about translation and localisation team's process as well.

Participants

Please get in touch if you'd like to be involved (asteele@turing.ac.uk), Anne Lee Steele on slack, or alternatively fill out this form: https://forms.gle/LU7TQfbHbis5PLDq8

Notes:

• Descriptions of different emerging teams
• Communication channels + how to join
• Emerging structure so far
• First project task - description

[aleesteele]

Core Team Meeting

At the second (ever!) core team meeting, hosted on 9 September, 2022 - the notion of working groups was introduced as a means of testing the above. Little structure or limits were given, except for an initial "assigned" task for the Editors and Reviewers + Trainers and Mentors WG.

Image reference: Sharan, Malvika and Andrea Sánchez-Tapia. "Community Governance: Representation & Intersectionality with examples from Open Science Community." Zenodo, 31 Aug. 2022, doi:10.5281/zenodo.7038553. https://zenodo.org/record/7038553

With this in mind, initial formats are emerging with the following teams (for the core/organisational team of The Turing Way:

Initial conversations were had with various team members about this working group process:

[aleesteele]

24 October

Observations from CM - to be used for #2318 (community research)

• Infrastructure and Translation may be task-oriented with clear goals (already emergent within the project). Trainers/mentors and editors/reviewers are focused on roles within the project, and with more "assigned" tasks: aka tasks that really needed doing within the project, but with a somewhat artificially-imp. In the latter two, the initial task is focused on technical debt within the project, and importance of alieviating that for the. Then document
• From what I can see, groups seems to be adopting google sheets as a means of organising tasks and lists, with some work documented on the repository (difficult to keep track of non-Github-issue-able work).
  • Trainers and mentors: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/105WCC53oAJ2XKK9qOvYjgKtJ3ty1zkBZBFb0IcjO_R8/edit#gid=1089702132
  • Reviewers & editors: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JhcKvwUjNLpLS5uExDGYFUXDeLsl5f746mVmj_gIf0M/edit#gid=0
• I can see "onboarding" into a group or role being an issue - can the CM help with documenting internal processes to help onboard members later on?
• Will grab documentation from the existing working groups (Book Dash Committee and Translation and Localisation team) to learn more about their process for other groups

[aleesteele]

1 November updates

• Sent feedback form to working groups: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/working-group-feedback
• Beginning the process of formalising the infrastructure working group team with a kick-off meeting, happening at Formalising a TTW infrastructure working group #2690. Had initial discussion with @sgibson91 about format and needs. Made slack channel for planning if of interest.
• Maybe ask translation and localisation team if they would be interested in filling out the working group feedback form? (Although their work is different, this could influence the process of the other groups

[aleesteele]

18 November updates

Presented at Community Share-outs

• Reviewers and Editors: The R&E team has been working to address stale issues within the project. They have reviewed more than ~80 historical issues of the project, shown in this google sheet. Learn more in their GitHub Discussion.
• Mentors and Trainers: The M&T team have been working to archive historical talks and workshops within the project, documented in this Google sheet. They have also reviewed our existing promotion packs. Learn more in this GitHub issue.
• Maintainers: An Infrastructure/Maintainers Working Group is beginning to formalise its efforts, as documented in this issue. They are in the process of formalising documention, the beginning of which is documented here.