Community and Community Roles

Everyone has a skill that is useful for someone, and therefore anyone can contribute to The Turing Way.

The Turing Way book has been co-authored by more than 450 diverse contributors and utilised by different groups of individuals who are researchers, educators, learners, policymakers, government employees and industry professionals.

Our community members and general audience includes, but are not limited to, researchers, students, data scientists, software engineers, project leaders, team coordinators, community managers, data stewards, librarians, data science educators, open science practitioners and more.

As of June 2024, The Turing Way community has been joined by more than 1000 members, who engage via GitHub, Slack Workspace and a range of community events. The book itself has 6000+ monthly users worldwide.

All contributions, discussions, and contributor details are handled through the central GitHub repository (the-turing-way/the-turing-way). Contributors’ details are available in the Contributors Records, and the project reports offer detailed updates from different areas of work within The Turing Way.

Project Delivery Team

The project is supported by The Alan Turing Institute under the Tools, Practices, and Systems (TPS) Programme, with several positions funded to work on The Turing Way.

The project is managed and its activities/goals are delivered by the project delivery team, which currently includes project leads Kirstie Whitaker (TPS Programme Director) and Malvika Sharan (TPS Senior Researcher), research community manager: Anne Lee Steele and a research project manager: Arielle Bennett (TPS Programme Manager).

Book-Related Roles

The book-related roles vary based on people’s involvement in reviewing, editing or developing new content in The Turing Way chapters, subchapters, impact stories, personal stories, case studies and templates. Reviewers are often drawn from the community, based on their experience in the chapter’s topic. Often, reviewers are also invited from beyond the community to ensure new members have the chance to collaborate based on their expertise.

• Co-authors: Co-authors collaborate on writing, editing, revising, or adding/replacing relevant sections of a chapter in The Turing Way book while following the ch-style.

• Reviewer: Reviewers critically review existing and new content of The Turing Way book, providing feedback, suggesting edits, and enhancing the accessibility, accuracy, and quality of the material.

• Editors: Editors oversee the overall coverage, coherence, and consistency of a chapter or a guide, or even the structure of The Turing Way book at a meta-level and document the current status and areas for improvement in a GitHub issue. They may not be the same people who address those issues, but they can be involved in coordinating contributions from authors and reviewers from the community.

• Mentors: Mentors guide less experienced contributors, offering advice and support to help them clarify concepts, unpack their thoughts and ideas, and provide direction to ensure that new members can effectively participate in the development of The Turing Way book.

• Translators: Contributors work the the Translation and Localisation team in translating any part of a chapter in the book as described in the ch-translation.

• Ad-hoc advisors/consultants: Individuals who are invited by our community members to ask for guidance and expertise in the context of their work in the book, community, or the overall project.

Mentored-Contributions

Existing members of the community are connected with new contributors for support and mentoring, such as helping navigate The Turing Way repository, workflow, writing process or even reviewing. Contributions also include providing advisory support, such as by sharing examples, resources or other relevant resources that could be helpful for the authors.

By enabling our community of users and contributors to engage with each other, we ensure that the project, community and resources can be used, shared and improved by diverse perspectives. We describe the contribution process in the contribution guidelines.

Beyond the Book

The book may be the visible product of the work we do in the project, but, the process of collaborative development with the help of its community is what we value the most. This project could not exist without the collaborative nature and willingness of our community members to support each other. We are committed to providing an open, accessible and inclusive space for all our community members where they are appreciated, upskilled and given opportunities to contribute to the project in a way that is most meaningful for them.

Roles beyond the book can involve, but are not limited to the following:

• Reviewers and maintainers of the book and underlying infrastructure

• Advocates and champions of The Turing Way resources, who help others navigate the book, repositories and communications channel

• Co-creators of content and infrastructure at any level from fixing bugs to adding new content beyond the book

• Mentors and consultants in specific areas of work, including responding to questions from other community members on GitHub and Slack

• Sustained contributors who provide expert consultation to improve the resources over a prolonged duration

• Members providing support through in-kind collaboration/partnership

• Connector, convener and collaborators from the broader data science network

• The Turing Way curious (‘lurkers’) users of resources who read, adopt and share best practices from The Turing Way in their work and participate in public events/communications channel

• Members sharing personal experience (which we value a lot!) to enrich The Turing Way resources with real-world contexts

• Speakers and presenters of any aspect of The Turing Way at different events and contexts.

New contributors to The Turing Way can begin their journey at any time, and through various pathways including voluntary participation, invited contribution, training/workshop-based introduction, organisational collaboration, and personal collaboration with other community members or others.

Our general recommendations for new starters are the following:

• Start small! Find easy wins!

• Start with what you don’t know and want to learn.

• Start with what you know and want to share.

• Capture the process of how good projects are carried out in data science.

• Flag what is unclear about The Turing Way or help build documents that you would like to have.

• Share your personal stories, case studies and perspective: The Turing Way is a ‘lightly’ opinionated guide after all!

To explore different pathways for community members to get involved, please visit the **Start Page: https://the-turing-way.start.page/.

Learn and Share Skills

Community members are provided with opportunities to learn new skills, share their ideas and collaborate with others. They are also given mentorship opportunities in the project as they make their contributions to The Turing Way or other open source projects and are encouraged to mentor new participants of the project.

Community members have been taking roles like trainers, workshop leads, translators, infrastructure maintenance, accessibility experts, representatives of different projects in The Turing Way and advocates of different topics of The Turing Way’s interest in external projects. Some of these areas of work have recently been formalised and are also being led by volunteer members (see Governance Roles). For instance, The Turing Way team and community members have been taking part in workshops from the very beginning. Some of these workshops have become part of regular events and conferences to introduce The Turing Way resources and data science practices to new audiences and early career researcher groups.

Delivery of these workshops includes the following roles:

• Expert facilitators and trainers of Open Science, Reproducibility and ethics-related workshops, both organised by The Turing Way and delivered at external events

• Technical trainer for novice learners on tools like GitHub, Binder, Jupyter and Literate Programming

• Presenters and speakers for international events/conferences who represent The Turing Way on external platforms

All members are supported to structure their work in The Turing Way to make them findable and onboard new members to provide continuity of their work. Researchers are also supported to lead community-based discussions and collaborations that lead to projects and outputs beyond The Turing Way.

Establish Partnership

The Turing Way project also involves collaborators from projects within the Turing, partnering organisations, open-source communities, and beyond, either formally through funded grant proposals or informally through collaborative activities such as co-creation of resources (such as chapters, articles or community documentation) and events (such as Fireside Chat, Book Dash and external conference session).

Represent The Turing Way

We have a chapter on ch-presenting to help you present and share about The Turing Way in your network.

The Turing Way team will be happy to discuss your ideas with you, provide feedback and any other assistance you need for delivering a talk.

For further details on these community roles, please read the Community Handbook describing different Contributions and their acknowledgements.