CW20 - 2020-03-31 to 2020-04-02

Idea 8 - Online Community Cookie Cutter c3- CI8-CW20

**Overview of the project: **Guiding documents/tools for leading and sustaining online research communities facilitated by collaborative projects or events.

Participants

Back up zoom: https://turing-uk.zoom.us/s/6507227126 (Malvika)

This document should be used to capture the information for a Collaborative Session / Hack Day Idea. (The total amount of text should ideally be between 100-300 words and you can include a diagram or two). The document should be no larger than two pages of A4. Don’t delete the details at the top of the document but you should delete all the hint text (grey, Arial 11, italic) once you no longer need it.

Notes on options:

  • Jo: tools/training for generating understanding of the structure of existing code, particularly w.r.t. data structures
  • Mateusz + Malvika: guidance/documentation for running remote hackathons - roles, responsibilities, checklists. How to set up events quickly but by covering all areas?
  • Colin: Tool to bootstrap an online community quickly: CoC, license, comms platform etc. Cookiecutter template?
  • Will: automated report card for research workflows. Mateusz: ELIXIR integrate with https://openebench.bsc.es https://bio.tools
  • Mateusz: could we have automated report cards/checklists for setting up online communities / running online events?
  • Jo: could include things in guidance/documentation for communities/events to help with cross-disciplinary work e.g. glossary?

Most interested in tools/guidance for quickly creating open online communities. What roles required? Mateusz: chair, treasurer, secretary on steering committee - sufficient to start with. Can then spin out task forces/sub-committees to work on specific challenges, which may include steering committee members. Other roles: maintainers. How to reward volunteers? How to avoid burnout - need documented ‘off-boarding’ exit strategy to complement on-boarding documentation. We as a community need training in leadership/project management?

Are we considering developing guidance for setting up online events/communties and/or tooling?

Colin: what’s the least one needs to know to set up an online community/event?

Malvika: how can people ask for help within these communities? Need to provide guidance? Jo: mentoring program useful within this?

Mateusz: ‘hackathons’ as a name is problematic - only appeals to a particular crowd and suggests staying up all night and eating pizza?

Can we put these ideas as chapters in the Turing way?

Summary:

  • Guiding documents/tools for building, leading and sustaining online research communities sprouted from an event.

Context / Research Domain

Please describe the context or research domain to which the problem applies

  • In Brief: Support and guidance for online communities working on open research
  • Researchers and research software engineers are rarely trained in community organisation. They may get involved in training and organising events, but they often will learn on the job on the go and rarely have access to support or guidance on current (or best) practices around community organisation.
  • This has been a long term problem for the RSE and other communities. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown has forced many people to work from home and developing and sustaining online communities is ever more important.
  • We want to use the experience and expertise from those activities ignited by COVID and document, to make it easier for future community organisers (researchers or RSEs) to start online communities.

Problem

Description of the problem you are trying to solve

Much guidance and many resources exist online on how to build communities or organize events. Several are being specifically developed for online communities. However, what is sorely needed is accessible guidance to leading and sustaining online research communities that get formed organically due to online events.

As we continue to work from home due to the COVID-19 situation worldwide and suspect that this will continue for a foreseeable future, we have felt a need for such a guidance in our network. This is due to the fact that online events and projects can be organized without the need for expensive resources like venue, catering or travelling. This situation has created a unique and equitable opportunity for anyone with the internet to lead such an event, however many of us need skills to lead and sustain such online projects and people working on them.

Researchers without any prior experience with project leadership would benefit from a one-stop-shop for guidance or signposts on how to lead their projects and the resulted communities. For example, there have been some efforts to address the need for leadership/management training in the RSE/data science communities (e.g RSE Aspiring Leaders workshop). However, there isn’t yet clear guidance on these topics in general and much of this training is geared towards managing/leading within hierarchical institutional structures rather than within agile cross-institutional teams.

To effectively and inclusively lead their projects, we want help volunteer leaders to understand and deploy tasks related to onboarding members, establishing help/guide or mentoring structure for them, rewarding their contributors, offboarding ideas so that people can leave any time (specifically to avoid burnout), reviewing/enforcing Code of Conduct, sustaining infrastructure/services, ensuring data privacy and information on project governance.

**Solution **

A cookie-cutter-like tool to guide you through creating a community

  • Either a “choose your own adventure” style guide to gamify the process
  • An interactive tool (or similar) that takes you through each of the essential steps and provides the user with options and recommendations based on your preferences (like an expanded version of the “Choose a licence” website)

And/or

A set of documents to capture best practice:

And/or

Making an interactive section to the Turing Way using Jupyter Book

Diagrams / Illustrations

You can include one or two diagrams in this section. Please ensure you have the right to use the image(s) and include attribution if applicable.