Read more about The Turing Way Book Dash
We are delighted to share that the sixth Book Dash was hosted successfully from 8 to 13 November 2021 with 24 participants, including our planning committee members.
Invited participants include (in the group picture - left to right and top to bottom): Esther Plomp, Kirstie Whitaker, Malvika Sharan, Andrea Sanchez Tapia, Emma Karoune, Batool Almarzouq, Arielle Bennett, Alejandro Coca, Reshama Shaikh, Lena Karvovskaya, Alden Conner, Vicky Hellon, Achintya Rao, Nina di Cara, (following members not in the group picture:) Ali Seyhun Saral, Maria Eriksson, Jessica Scheick, Marta Mangiarulo, Emmanuelle Rodrigues Nunes, Margaret Wanjiku, Melissa Steda and Ankur Kumar.
Aida Mehonic, Jez Cope, Martin O’Reilly, Martina Vilas, Patricia Herterich and Michaela Agaopiou, were among several community members who joined us at the Community Share outs.
Discussion and collaboration among the attendees at this Book Dash covered a wide range of topics including data sharing such as sensitive data and metadata (Emma Karoune, Maria Eriksson and Margaret Wanjiku), data ethics (Nina di Cara and Ali Seyhum Saral, research infrastructure (Arielle Bennett and Esther Plomp, research publication (Lena Karvovskaya, Achintya Rao and Vicky Hellon), impact assessment in research (Jessica Scheick and Reshama Shaikh), translation process in different languages (Alejandro Coca, Batool Almarzouq and Andrea Sanchez Tapia), data visualisation (Marta Magiarulo), analysis pipelines (Ankur Kumar, Emmanuelle Rodriguez Nunes), remote collaboration (Melissa Black) and code citation (the eScience centre team members Carlos Martinez, Abel Siqueira and Faruk Diblen).
The Turing Way Book Dash events are a less intense version of Book Sprints, where participants collaboratively work on The Turing Way book synchronously to develop new chapters and review/edit existing ones to make them more accessible, comprehensive and up-to-date. They also contribute to enhancing the project by improving the ways we work in the community and take lead on accomplishing different tasks or subprojects.
The November edition of Book Dash featured 18 contributors, 6 committee members, 13 online working sessions, four discussions and social events, and two community share-outs.
In the past, we have organised 1-1.5 day long Book Dash events in person or partially remote. However, since November 2020, we have been hosting Book Dashes online and with multiple short co-working called development sessions spread over 5 days for flexible participation by members. We developed this format to allow people in different time zones to participate with the same efficiency and equitable support. This involved creating multiple small development sessions throughout the day, adding dedicated sessions for informal social interactions, developing shared documents with all the information, providing support funds to ensure that everyone can comfortably participate and hosting a pre-event call to communicate these resources to everyone.
As in the past, we invited applications through an open call where interested applicants could state their goals and interest for the Book Dash. This application was also open for the long term members from the community who may have attended a Book Dash or Collaboration Cafes in the past to join as a helper and mentor for new contributors as well.
Applicants were asked to think about the collaborative element of the Book Dash and state how they could engage with other participants. To get a sense of the time zones these applicants came from, we asked them to choose their preferred slots during the day that they can join. You can see a template of this document here.
The Book Dash Planning Committee used the rubrics (as explained in the online chapter) to score the applications during the review. They met online to discuss applications, frame feedback and conclude their selection process.
Arielle Bennett, Batool Almarzouq, Brigitta Sipőcz, Carlos Martinez, Emma Karoune and Esther Plomp joined the planning committee early this year and successfully delivered their first Book Dash in May.
Planning committee members (order - left to right and top to bottom): Arielle Bennett, Batool Almarzouq, Brigitta Sipocz, Carlos Martnez, Emma Karoune, Esther Plomp
Learn more about them:
- Arielle is the Research Project Manager for the Tools, Practices & Systems Programme at the Alan Turing Institute. In The Turing Way, she has worked on writing, facilitating discussion and mentored contributions in the Guide for Ethical Research (details).
- Batool is a postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center and the founder of Open Science Network and R-Ladies in Saudi Arabia. Batool is an infrastructure maintainer in The Turing Way and brings her rich experience in computation as a mentor, content creator, translator and core contributor in the project (details).
- Brigitta is an astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. She is involved in several open source communities as a developer and maintainer of open source astronomy software. In The Turing Way, she has contributed to infrastructure support and crucial discussions on community channels (details).
- Carlos is a Community Manager at eScience Center Netherlands. As an engineer and advocate of improving software quality, he facilitates the collaboration of the eScience centre with The Turing Way in providing guidelines and helping build better research software (details).
- Emma is a Research Associate and Community Manager of DECOVID at The Alan Turing Institute, and an Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoecology researcher. She has led several collaborations and discussions on chapters within the Guides for Collaboration and Communication (details).
- Esther is a Data Steward at the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. She has been a core contributor to the project developing, guiding and collaborating on chapters related to data management and reproducibility (details).
We want to express our gratitude for their thoughtful engagement in the project and for helping build an inclusive and safe place in the Book Dash. It is only with their help, we can host the next event in November taking careful consideration for our participants.
- Call for application start date: 15 August 2021
- Deadline: 01 October 2021 (midnight anywhere on Earth)
- Decisions on the applications: before 20 October 2021
- Pre Book Dash Onboarding calls (1 hour): 02 November 2021
- Pre Book Dash GitHub Skill-up (1 hours training): 03 November 2021
- Book Dash Development Sessions during the week: 08-12 November 2021
- The Turing Way community share-out: 12 November 2021
Exciting additions from this Book Dash, as captured concisely by Esther Plomp in her blog:
- Batool, Andrea and Alejandro worked on improving the documentation of translation within the Community Handbook.
- Batool also managed to deliver a Talk on The Turing Way on the same week as the Book Dash (where she chaired multiple sessions, including a workshop for new GitHub contributors)
- Marta led a discussion on data visualisation and is writing a chapter which will be reviewed by Emanuelle under Pull Request #1563
- Arielle, Lena and Esther worked on a new chapter on research infrastructure roles, which is published as a chapter in the Guide for Collaboration
- Achintya worked on fixing the style of markdown chunks in the book, and reviewed many contributions by others throughout the week, along with collaborating with Lena on a chapter on Peer Review drafted under Pull Request #2180
- Vicky worked on a revision of the Open Access subchapter
- Lena and Jessica worked on a chapter on Peer Review
- Reshama worked on a chapter on how to measure the impact of events along with Jessica, which is in progress in Pull Request #2183.
- Jessica also worked on a how-to review a GitHub Pull Request Guide
- Emma and Maria worked on a chapter on sensitive data, which is being reviewed under Pull Request #2076.
- Malvika improved the workflow for archiving the Turing Way using Zenodo which is documented here. She also made new releases on The Turing Way under the DOI:10.5281/zenodo.5671094 with The Turing Way community as contributors.
- Faruk, Abel and Carlos worked on software section of Making Research Objects Citable and a chapter on reusable code
- Margaret worked on the metadata section, which is online as a subchapter of Research Data Management
- Nina had started to work on a chapter during the last Book Dash on Sel-Reflection in Ethical Research. Ali joined her to structure and review that chapter, which is now online in the Guide for Ethical Research.
- Ankur worked on a section about best practices around capturing and sharing analysis pipelines, which he has described under issue #2171.
- Melissa updated the chapter on Tools for Remote Collaboration, which is being reviewed under Pull Request #2197.
GitHub activities:
- 12 Issues
- 21 Pull Requests
- 7 chapters were published or updated, along with several new drafts that are under progress
- Several first-time contributors to an Open Source project repository.
Presentations:
- Introduction: CC-BY 4.0, The Turing Way, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5654766, http://zenodo.org/record/5654766, Google slides: https://tinyurl.com/bookdash-nov21
- GitHub intro session: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vR-Qu4kYulSMGnnAHH9-OonNiLkaJrsolEecEkt0VD5_3PmKWePmiSQwxK3QHoq5gNsL-MJKowmgsAx/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.g526267be46_0_606
Videos:
We have posted videos from the introduction session on the first day of the Book Dash, and two community shareouts on the last day of the Book Dash. Please find the full playlist on YouTube
Our attendees also participated in a 'show and tell' social mean and three informal discussions on the following topics: - Emergent leadership: Open discussion by Malvika Sharan - Data Visualisation: Prompted discussion by Marta Mangiarulo - Data Ethics by Nina di Cara
- Illustration files: https://zenodo.org/record/3332807, cite as The Turing Way Community, & Scriberia. (2021). Illustrations from the Turing Way book dashes. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807
At the end of the event, we asked our participants to share feedback anonymously in the "Pluses and Deltas" HackMD.
We greatly appreciate the work that our attendees have accomplished in the project during this short event and thank them for their feedback, a few of which have been highlighted below.
- Having multiple sessions with a shared document was really helpful
- I loved that there were always people around to help
- I really appreciate the work done to link up people who could work on the same topics/chapters.
- I really appreciate how "people-first" the book dash is
- The warm community and ice-breaking dynamics make it super easy to start from the beginning.
- I love the illustration session and the opportunity to work with the artist!
- Felt that participants needed more briefing on working with the Scriberia artists
- Maybe use a dedicated calendar tool for schedules
- Audio-only sessions?
- Running alongside existing events/conferences?
- How can we get more of our community members involved? (doing similar coordinative work as eScience centre)
- I think part of the Book Dash is getting to know your way around things so it takes a little while.
- Take a lead on addressing some of the concerns raised on the Delta feedback
- Represent The Turing Way in your community/conference, see our promotion pack
- Attend a synchronous coworking such as online Collaboration Cafes take place every first and second Wednesdays from 15:00 to 17:00 London time. Or weekly Coworking call every Monday from 11:00 - 12:00 London time.
- Host one of these calls, see details here: https://book.the-turing-way.org/community-handbook/coworking.html
- Attend a fireside chat, or speak at one, or organise one in your community: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/fireside-chats
- Contribute new topics or review open pull requests
- Join us on social media platforms or connect in other ways described here: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/demo-intro
Here are a few suggestions for good first contributions:
- Fix a typo in the book and/or repository.
- Flag the unclear or duplicated information in the book by opening an issue on the GitHub.
- Fix an old issue or comment on the the pull requests.
- Write your personal experience of reproducible research in this google form.
- See more info on the GitHub: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/main/book/website/community-handbook/coworking/coworking-collabcafe.md
- Application form: https://forms.gle/817Nj3fypRDK1q1v7
- Application draft template: https://tinyurl.com/tw-bookdash-template
- Eventbrite page for the participants to register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-turing-way-london-book-dash-november-2021-tickets-184864082447.
- Document with all links: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-index
- Onboarding calls, 02 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-onboarding
- GitHub Skill-up Session and Collaboration Cafe, 03 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-github
- Scriberia Session Bookings: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-scriberia
- For specific notes from each day, please visit one of the following notes:
- Day 1, 08 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-day1
- Day 2, 09 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-day2
- Day 3, 10 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-day3
- Day 4, 11 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-day4
- Day 5, 12 November: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-day5
- Post-event feedback: https://hackmd.io/@turingway/bookdash-nov2021-feedback
- Reports from the previous events:
Bonus Playlist with songs selected by our attendees Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTIzsTv1ENY&list=PLBxcQEfGu3DldMWK2Z9xz_CEaHHp19Vma
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