Patricia Herterich, University of Birmingham 31 May 2019
I made a variety of contributions to the Turing Way. At the start of the project, I drafted contributing guidelines, Code of Conduct and other documents that established an open project on GitHub that everyone could easily contribute to. I also (co-)authored three chapters of the handbook: Reproducibility, Research Data Management, and Collaborating on GitHub/GitLab. I reviewed the chapter on Open Research.
My main focus was on building a community around the Turing Way project that would provide feedback on the core team's work and contribute their knowledge. Thus, I presented on the Turing Way at local networks at the University of Birmingham and the Inaugural meeting of the UK network of Open Research Working Groups. In addition, I set up a monthly newsletter summarizing the activities carried out by the team and advertising any upcoming events. I helped facilitate the "Boost your reproducibility with Binder" workshop in London and the "Build a BinderHub" workshop in Sheffield. I was the main coordinator for the Turing Way book dashes in Manchester and London. I also set up a zenodo community where all the team's presentations are available for everyone to re-use.
My presentations were attended by 35 - 40 people that learned about the Turing Way. A talk at a major international library conference is still outstanding. The newsletter has 211 subscribers that receive our monthly updates (number as of 24 May 2019).
Our book dashes have been attended by 13 attendees each and resulted in a variety of contributions to the book: proof reading and improved formatting of chapters, contributing new chapters (e.g. on coding styles and machine learning) adding more information to existing chapters. The book dashes introduced several attendees to GitHub and principles of collabortating openly.
Working on the Turing Way was my first collaboration on a large openly developed project in quite a while and it was a pleasure to be part of the core project team. It was amazing to see such an interest in the project, especially from early career researchers and I loved building the community around the Turing Way. Contributing to the Turing Way helped me identify which activities I want to focus on in my career going forward.
Working with research software engineers and data scientists, I gained new knowledge on computational environments, testing, and continuous intergration and I am more confident in having conversations about these topics and pointing researchers to resources that help then such as the Turing Way handbook.