:wave: Hello!

Welcome to the Open Practices Toolkit repository!

:construction: We are currently undergoing a lot of refactoring :construction:

And as such this README is a little out of date :confused:

Please checkout our Welcome Issue which is acting as our interim README

In the meantime, you can always chat with us in our gitter room :point_down:

Open Source Service Area

A service area sharing the knowledge and skills to participate in or grow an open project with the Turing research community.

Hello! Welcome! And thank you for visiting the Open Source Service Area repository.

This README is a hub to give you some information about what the service area hopes to achieve, where you can find out more, and how you can get involved.

• What are we doing?
• The Team
• What do we need?
• Get involved
• Find out more
• Repository Structure
• License

What are we doing?

Presently, there is no formal support mechanism for embedding best practices around open software development, open community growth, or making open contributions available in Research Engineering or the Turing Institute. This gap impedes a number of pathways to delivering the Turing’s mission statement, such as: the ability to support Turing projects that want to work openly, the Institute’s ability to find and form new collaborations, and a reduction in efficiency since work is often duplicated or reinvented.

Working to either build an open project from the ground up or contributing work to an existing open source project requires a set of skills that include, but are not limited to, technical capability, such as connecting with and participating in a community, or building and managing a community. By providing a support system for developing and embedding these skills into Turing projects, we can accelerate innovation and research output across the Institute by effectively collaborating across the Turing network, forging new connections, and reducing duplicated effort by building on existing tools. Overall, positively impacting the Turing’s ability to deliver world-leading data science.

This service area will work with the Tools, Practices and Systems research programme, The Turing Way, and various research projects to build an open and reusable framework for translating research output into open contributions and/or open communities. This will empower researchers in the Turing community who wish to work openly to feel confident in how they structure their projects and engage stakeholders to achieve their open research goals. Thus facilitating more open research from within the Turing and further collaboration between the Turing and the open source community.

The Team

For more information on who the team are and how to get in contact with them, please see the ways of working document.

What do we need?

You! In whatever way you can help!

Part of this Service Area involves assessing current open working practices in the Turing research community, before we can design an appropriate framework that supports, encourages and empowers researchers. You need to know where you are before you can know where you're going! You can help the in this initiative by either performing interviews or agreeing to be interviewed. Get in touch with a member of the team to find out more.

We also need researchers and/or projects with an interest in open working to volunteer to work with us as we develop and implement the framework. And lastly, any valuable expertise from experienced open sourcerers (:mage:) would be huge contributions to the framework design process!

Get involved

If you think you can help in any of the areas described above or in any of the many areas that we haven't yet thought of, then please check our Contributing Guidelines and get in touch with the team.

Please note that it is very important to us that we maintain a positive and supportive environment for everyone who wants to participate. When you join us, we ask that you follow our code of conduct in all interactions both on and offline.

Find out more

You can find the roadmap outlining the long- and short-term goals of the project in the ROADMAP.md file.

• Current project phase: :one:
• Current project planning board: Phase 1: User Research Roadmap

Other project management documentation includes:

• The project proposal
• The project open canvas
• Our Ways of Working
• Our Code of Conduct
• Our Contributing Guidelines

Respository Structure

• You will find documents relating to project management in the project_mgmt folder
• Any templates or documentation resources are located in the project_dev_docs folder, which is then broken down by phase according to the roadmap

License

This work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.