Review Governance written material

[aleesteele]

No description provided.

[aleesteele]

Theory and Practice of Working Groups: https://hackmd.io/@aleesteele/SyxRDBath
Three levels of decision-making: https://hackmd.io/p_VjibHcT2uvDK2FC7Dx8A?both

Send final draft to be reviewed by 31 January by MS

[aleesteele]

@AlexandraAAJ and @aleesteele to send to MS for review by 31 of January.

[aleesteele]

Going to very beginning of the project: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HcKjeikxAAfKDCb5Okh1EqPbabedM3c7xIVuKv1Cqeg/edit#slide=id.g13b346a17cb_0_535

Hi everyone! 👋I wish I could join you at your meeting today, but alas. I’ll be in a course called Solidarity Infrastructures at the School for Poetic Computation - which might be interesting for folks here. Hope to join you another time. If you have any questions or would like to chat, feel free to reach out to me at asteele@turing.ac.uk :) or on the TTW slack (linked on the page).

I thought I’d tell you a little bit about how I went about forming working groups with The Turing Way project. I joined the project in March 2022, and spent the first 6 months learning more about the project which you can read more about. This culminated in realising that there were identifiable workstreams within the project that could be formalised into ‘working groups’ to help field support and agency in the growing project (and prevent the theory of structurelessness), taking cues from the models of other open source communities (and other forms of social organisation). This research into governance was pretty informal (like this slide deck of research), and also formaled (like when we participated in the Open Life Science programme)... And it’s been a bumpy road, but a huge learning experience!

The following 6 months (Sept 2022 - March 2023) were spent working on supporting the trialing of 4 working groups: Trainers & Mentors, Reviewers & Editors, Infrastructure, and Accessibility. We also formalised a working group for Translation and Localisation, a sub-community that had formed organically in the previous two years. For groups meeting for the first time, we helped to set up their meeting infrastructure: aims, project ideas, meeting notes, and other bits and bobs. At times we gave over the reins too early (and they felt they had no support or guidance for their work), and with others, we’ve held on to the reins perhaps a bit too tightly. Looking back on that time, it became clear that this is what moving at the speed of trust looks like, to quote adrienne marie brown.

From March 2023 to September 2023, I started preparing documentation needed to help with this formalisation in a templatable way for other similar groups to form working groups (you can see a PR I finally made with some of this info here!), and we also moved into a github organisation (from a repository), which has allowed different groups to have their own spaces/repositories. This has helped with increased autonomy and increased decentralisation of the project.

From September to December 2023, we were conceptualising and planning the Book Dash, our biannual contribution event. This was a testing ground for another working group, this time oriented around a community event (like a planning committee!). We invited different community members and used this space to trial learnings from the first two working groups, with more support for meeting infrastructure.

In January 2024: there’s a bunch of documentation and learnings to share about the whole process. Narrating it like this - it seems like we were always going to be like this, but that was definitely not the case! Hope that helps with your discussion ☺️

[aleesteele]

Closing this as the other piece is currently being reviewed!