Bridging contributor's knowledge and the technology of The Turing Way, an open guide for data science

A lightning talk, giving a personal perspective on enabling contributors in The Turing Way.
Presented at the Open Research devroom at FOSDEM24.

Conference page and recording

Abstract

The Turing Way is a handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science.
The book is a collaborative effort; over 470 contributors from many, diverse backgrounds share their wisdom in its pages.
The size of the community means that not everyone will share the same technical skills, preferred tools, or ways of working.
The book is built from Markdown source files using JupyterBook and work is largely coordinated on GitHub.
We want to maintain and promote the benefits of version control, plain text and open working.
However, this can clash with the experience and expectations of collaborators, raising the barrier to contribution and potentially making people feel unwelcome.

I will talk from my perspective as an RSE and co-lead of The Turing Way's infrastructure working group about lessons in bridging the knowledge of our community and the technology of how the book is produced.