Make hut23-open-source-sa public

[llewelld]

As the Open Source Service Area we should be promoting the ideal of working in the open. One step towards this would be to make the project board and assocated repo public.

This would provide visibility within the Turing, make it easier for us to collaborate with people both internally and externally, and also help (in a small way) to showcase the open source work REG and the Turing is doing to the rest of the world.

The Turing Way already uses a completely open approach, and although very different to a Service Area, it's an example of the Turing doing this well.

There are a few considerations I came up with that we might need to think about.

1. Existing tickets and discussion would be made public; would this be okay?
2. Would we need to make completely clear to future contributors that it's all public?
3. Are there implications of users/email address being included on tickets?

[mhauru]

Thanks for raising this. We started with REG-only out of abundance of caution, but meant to review this.

We should talk about this as a team, and I need to personally think about this. My first instinct is that we should be Turing-wide visible (currently REG-only). I'm unsure about public internet visible.

The three considerations you raised are all good ones. I would also add the following two:

4. We would need to be mindful of not revealing through the issues information other parts of the Turing are not comfortable sharing, such as making public activities of other teams without their consent. This is essentially a subpoint of your 1. and 2.
5. Is there a chance that feeling like our writings here are public affects how we communicate, in a way that hinders our work? If yes, is that outweighed by the benefits of being public?

[mhauru]

@JimMadge:

I would support that, I don't think it is a barrier and it goes with the spirit of the service area. It would be worth checking that there are no comments with "secret" information. (In general, I think it is better to start open, otherwise you tend to find you end up adding commits or comments that prevent you from being public in the future :grimacing:)

[phinate]

Relaying a comment I had in our meeting today: I'm very pro-this in general! I was just thinking that there is also a tangible benefit from having a space where you know your collaborators are the only people that are privy to the things that you're saying. Then again, I suppose that's what Slack is for. Maybe I am just pro-this (with the caveat that we should address the README to the public too) :)

[mhauru]

Points raised, by various people, in our meeting today:

• You could have both a private and a public repo, and mix issues from both on the same board. You could also have non-issue tickets on the board, though I think these are very restricted in their functionality.
• It could be good to have some space where we can have conversations amongst just people actively contributing. There are many options for what this space could be though.
• Public-by-default would be very much in the spirit of the OSSA, and be a good advertisement as well.

[mhauru]

We discussed this in the last two catch-up meetings and decided to make this repo fully public. There were a few issues and comments that mentioned Turing internal stuff. They were all very minor and could be solved by small edits, which @llewelld and I made.

I also updated the README.md, the only file in the repo, to read

REG Open Source Service Area (OS SA)

This is the repository of the Open Source Service Area of the Research Engineering Group of the Alan Turing Institute. We work to make REG a better open source citizen by contributing and enabling and encouraging the rest of REG and Turing to contribute to the wider open source ecosystem.

All content in this repo is in the issues and the related project board. We use them to track ideas and discuss what we could do, plan to do, are doing, and have done.

This is a public repository

Note that this repo is not Turing or REG internal, but rather fully public. We champion a culture of openness, and the vast majority of our conversations are fine for all the world to read. However, please be mindful when discussing in this repo to

• not talk about any Turing internal policies/practicies/events/discussions, or things that concern other teams that they have not consented to being made public.
• not refer to individuals who aren't on GitHub, at least not without their consent, or who might not want that reference to them being made publicly.

For any non-public information, feel free to link to Turing internal resources when necessary.

With that, I think we are good to flip the switch to public. I'll let it sit for a couple of days in case anything comes up.

[mhauru]

Done!