The Turing Way: Creating visible roles and recognitions for maintainers in our community

The Turing Way (https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/welcome) is an open source, open collaboration and community-driven handbook to reproducible, ethical and inclusive data science and research. Our goal is to provide all the information that different stakeholders in research and data science need at the start of their projects to ensure that they maintain the highest reproducible and ethical standards at all stages of development. 

Built upon a culture of collaboration, The Turing Way community is designed to be welcoming, inclusive and accessible to its members from diverse backgrounds and domain expertise. Since 2019, The Turing Way has grown from a small team of 10 researchers to an international community of collaborators from around the world. More than 300 researchers have contributed to the book by creating, maintaining and sustaining more than 250 pages across five guides on reproducibility, collaboration, communication, project design and ethics. They have co-authored chapters and developed resources that have been used by the researchers, policymakers, educators and professionals worldwide in learning and promoting research best practices in different research and open source communities. The Turing Way would simply not exist without the commitment and the willingness of our community members to engage and facilitate the engagement of others in various maintenance roles. 

Most maintenance roles in open source are crucial for ‘community care’ work that can stay hidden or go unnoticed if not recognised openly or given visible positions in the community. However, in The Turing Way, we are committed to providing a fair acknowledgement system for all our maintainers. No matter how small or big their contributions are, all maintainers are visibility recognised in The Turing Way community and included as shared authors of The Turing Way book. We believe that if we do not recognise all contributions, we will end up disproportionately ignoring the hidden labour that a lot of people do, especially those who are already marginalised groups or excluded from Open Source and tech spaces. With our commitment to fair acknowledgement in this project, we create opportunities to highlight the work of every maintainer and create equitable opportunities for community leadership without trying to fit The Turing Way into a traditional credit system.

In this talk, I will introduce various community processes we have established and practice in The Turing Way to incentivise, recognise and publicly acknowledge all our contributors. All attendees will leave the talk understanding many dimensions of community engagement pathways and how they can participate in an inclusive, kind and inspiring open source ecosystem via The Turing Way. All questions and contributions are welcome at the GitHub repository: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way.