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Host repository for The Turing Way: a how to guide for reproducible data science
http://the-turing-way.org/
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[WIP] chapter: Remote and distributed collaboration #960

Closed malvikasharan closed 3 years ago

malvikasharan commented 4 years ago

Detailed description

Branch for this chapter:

Table of contents

Resources

PR: #962

Issues with contents to added in the chapter (check boxes when added)

Checklists

External resources

Discussion points/related issues

Current status

This chapter is currently developing. If anyone would like to contribute they are more than welcome to do so.

Updates

Content developed so far:

malvikasharan commented 4 years ago

CW20 hack-day Idea 8

Online Community Cookie Cutter (c3)

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

Participants

Context

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

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

And/or

And/or

malvikasharan commented 4 years ago

CW20 hack-day Idea 5 #1005

Remote Conferences and Collaboration: The Turing Way - CI5-CW20

Context / Research Domain

Due to the current COVID-19 crisis, remote work has become the default mode of working for most people in research, but it has also been common practice for different people and projects before that. How can we, working remotely, maintain the communities in this mode, and make sure that the community and the people involved in it remain healthy, and productive, and have all the information and technical support they need? In open-source, this sort of remote work has been common. How can we disseminate the lessons learned in these communities to research groups and teams who are experiencing remote work, collaboration, teaching for the first time?

Problem

People may never have worked with any of the available collaboration tools, and may not have seen the necessity of using them. Those that are new to these workflows and tools may find it hard to find and access the available resources. Nevertheless they will need to find answers to questions such as “Are the tools we choose to run our events accessible across all platforms?”, “Do we exclude, e.g., Windows users by picking a particular video conferencing tool?”, “We miss the sociability of the coffee breaks, how can we simulate them?”, ”Are there different opportunities we gain from being remote?”, “How can we counter the dangers of being in a remote event, e.g., doing multiple things at once instead of just ‘being at the conference’?”

Solution

We describe considerations, workflows and tools for running remote activities for people that need to facilitate such an event but don’t have any previous experience. We would also like to capture things about CW20 that worked well for running future online conferences. In the course, we will describe which tools and features work well for which purpose, and other features (e.g., pricing, necessity to download, open/closed source). We also suggest solutions for more general issues, such as scheduling, and work modes suitable for online conferences (e.g., set your away message to be able to concentrate on the online event). Outcome

A subsection of a Turing Way chapter on running collaborative online events which describes the use case of running an online event with different requirements.

Proposed Structure:

Activity types / Use cases (Mix and match these to build your online event!)

sgibson91 commented 4 years ago

@malvikasharan The checklists mentioned in the top comment, are there issues/PRs for those?