The Turing Way Working Groups#
A working group (WG) is an organised group or committee within a project, organisation or community. WGs are formed for a specific purpose, such as addressing a need or opportunity identified in a project or community. WGs are composed of individuals who bring their interests, expertise, or willingness to engage with a specific topic or context for which the WG is formed. WG members collaborate to provide accountability, solve problems and make decisions to achieve the goals set for the group. WGs scope can be time-bound (short-term or long-term) or open-ended based on the type of tasks the group is assigned.
WGs are used across many sectors including government, academia, business and nonprofit or volunteer-led organisations to decentralise operations and decision making. In open science, many communities carry out their work through established WGs. Projects like Jupyter, Kubernetes, Eclipse Foundation, Sustain OSS, The Carpentries and CHAOSS are few examples where WGs have been organised to ensure timely and open engagement with their communities.
Within The Turing Way, WGs are formed by a small groups of people who work together on specific topics, themes, or types of work identified by community members as areas of interest. From the onset, different kinds of work in The Turing Way project have been led and executed by different groups of people. For example, since 2020, localisation and translation work is being carrying out by a group international community members, who although initially worked in an ad-hoc manner, later were named and recognised as ‘Translation and Localisation Team’. Similarly, in 2021, after moving Book Dash as online-first event, a ‘Book Dash Planning Committee’ was convened yearly joined by a few previous attendees of Book Dashes who supported the planning and delivery of the event. Nonetheless, formation of WGs had largely remained informal: after existing streams of work had been identified, community members engaged with the work were formally recognised and encouraged to develop ways of working that align with their needs.
However, as the community has grown, creating explicit pathways for formalising WGs is the only way for ensuring that everyone has the same opportunity to navigate and benefit from structure that WGs provide. We also recognise that lack of guidance leads to the tyranny of structurelessness, where navigating information may be easier for people who have been involved from the beginning, the uncertainty of roles and responsibilities can ultimately exclude those who don’t have direct contact with the project team.
In The Turing Way, the formalisation of WGs started in 2022. The current research community manager of the project started her familiarity with the project through community mapping work in 2022. The goals were to (1) formalise already existing and ongoing work within the community, and (2) support new areas of work that could address the observed and documented needs of the project and community.
We believe that everyone in The Turing Way community has expertise to share, and thereby anyone can join our project and community. We describe different ways to contribute to the project in our contribution guideline. Similarly, we encourage anyone who would like to join an existing WG to reach out to the specific chairs and leads of those group (find details of our current WG).
While anyone who joins The Turing Way can attend a WG meeting and join the WG, joining a WG is not a requirement for engaging with The Turing Way.
We have also been hosting The Turing Way Community Forums where WG members share updates and provide resources for the community members to get involved (recordings on our YouTube channel).
For informal groups that are interested in formalising their work, developing a working group offers an opportunity for groups to benefit from formalised support from The Turing Way team, as well as to openly get recognition for their work within the community. However, there are a few requirements for community members to create a working group, process and documentation for which is provided in this chapter.
With information shared in this chapter, we want to ensure that community members can identify infrastructure and support they need, as well as ways to sustain WGs’ efforts. A standard approach for establishing and managing WG will also allow The Turing Way leadership and project delivery team to provide the oversight and support needed to bring cohesiveness across all WGs and align WGs goals with the project’s overarching goals.
The process described in this chapter adheres to our commitment to ensuring transparency and engagement with our community. For WGs this means that our community members are informed of the WGs work and can participate openly, ensuring critical mass required to establish, maintain and sustain a WG.
In addition to guidelines and process for formalising a WG, we provide a template (in the final subchapter) for interested members of the community to self-organise, incubate, maintain, and/or eventually sunset a working group. This document, as is the case with The Turing Way guides themselves is a living document. Please help us keep this updated as the community and its governance evolves.