Building a Culture of Collaboration in Open Source Communities with The Turing Way

The Turing Way (https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/welcome) is a community-driven open source book project that involves and supports a diverse research community in ensuring that reproducible, collaborative, ethical and inclusive data research is "too easy not to do". Using this project as a model, I will discuss the importance of collaborative development, documentation and sharing best practices that can be adopted by various stakeholders to make their research more reproducible and effective.

Built upon a culture of collaboration, The Turing Way is designed to be welcoming, inclusive and accessible to its members from diverse backgrounds and expertise. It is an open source project, that facilitates all contributions, questions, comments, and discussions via an online repository: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way. Since last year, more than 200 researchers have contributed to this project. They have co-authored chapters and developed resources that have been used by the scientific communities worldwide in learning and promoting reproducible methods in different computational research communities.

The project has grown from a small team of 10 researchers to a community of collaborators from around the world. The scope of The Turing Way book has also expanded to include the different aspects of reproducibility, project design, collaboration, communication, and ethics in data research. We continue to support our members in learning new skills and facilitate their interaction with the project via online co-working spaces and mentored-contributions.

We believe that projects like The Turing Way, that promote a culture of collaboration, can have a significant impact on improving access to information and the equitable decision-making process by our peers and future generations. We further invite FOSS participants to make use of The Turing Way and participate in its community by contributing and enhancing its resources with their perspectives.