Rachael Ainsworth
31 May 2019
Before joining The Turing Way project, I helped facilitate the Boost Your Research Reproducibility with Binder workshop in Manchester and the Build a BinderHub workshop in Sheffield, and participated in the one-day sprint in Sheffield. I then joined The Turing Way full time from April through May 2019 with a focus on community building. I dove head-first into the project during the hackday at Collaborations Workshop 2019, where I was able to see how contributors navigate the project GitHub repository and where their pain points were. I co-organised, facilitated and reported on the book dashes in Manchester and London, and gave the Introduction presentation at both events (Manchester slides, London slides). I have also reviewed pull requests, helped manage the GitHub repository, participated in discussions on Twitter, GitHub and the Gitter channel, and helped people contribute to the project through GitHub.
I have further proposed to present The Turing Way at the Open Science Fair as a poster and/or a demonstration. I am currently preparing the Boost Your Research Reproducibility with Binder for submission to the Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE), and will do the same for the Build a BinderHub.
By joining The Turing Way team quite late, I was able to evaluate how easy it was (or wasn't) to contribute to the project. I was able to refine the Contributing Guidelines through creating contributor personas and pathways and through feedback from the hackday, workshops and book dashes to help improve the experience of contributing to the project. It is clear that GitHub itself poses the major challenge for many contributors, but it is a very powerful tool for collaborating openly. Continuously updating the Contributing Guidelines (and chapters on Version Control and Collaborating on GitHub/GitLab) as challenges are exposed will therefore be essential for encouraging new contributions.
From the book dash events alone, we onboarded 26 new contributors and gained 94 new issues and pull requests. These consisted of improving the infrastructure of the project, editing and adding further information to existing chapters, and new chapters on topics such as reproducible data analysis, very large datasets, ethical decision making, coding style and credit for reproducible research. Four book dash participants also celebrated their first pull requests! I have also spoken to two participants/contributors who have started using the handbook day-to-day in their own work.
The Turing Way now has 56 contributors in total, performing tasks such as discussing ideas, suggesting topics, reviewing chapter content, editing existing content and contributing new content. When contibutors bring to light the challenges associated with getting involved in the project, I add further information to the Contributing Guidelines to help contributors overcome these obstacles in the future.
The Boost Your Research Reproducibility with Binder workshop resources are presently under review by the core team and will soon be submitted to JOSE to increase visibility and reuse of these materials. Once reviewed by the journal, we will repeat the process for the Build a BinderHub workshop resources to maximise the impact of the outputs of The Turing Way.
The Turing Way was the first opportunity I have had to put my Mozilla Open Leadership training to the test on such a large-scale open project. In addition to being inspired by such an incredible team of people, I have vastly improved my collaborating on GitHub skills and learned new skills such as incorporating continuous integration, using Jupyter Book and Netlify. Being a core member of The Turing Way reinforced my desire to work in such an area full-time, and empowered me to pursue a community management position in the domain of open research. I look forward to applying the skills I've gained to future projects, and to continue encouraging others (and myself) to contribute to and use The Turing Way. It is a resource and a community that I wish I had from the very beginning.