The Turing Way's 2024 Year in Review and End of the Year Updates!
Explore The Turing Way Book and connect with us via our start page.
As we bid farewell to 2024, we're thrilled to close another landmark year for The Turing Way community.
We have grown to over 1,300 Slack members and 516 contributors across 400+ chapters in The Turing Way, and reached 80,000 active users of the book worldwide. Your role has been invaluable in supporting both our project and community, especially in such a demanding year.
Like previous years, in this newsletter we will look back at 2024 month by month, to spotlight the milestones and accomplishments we have achieved together throughout the year.
✨ Check out "Community News and Updates" for a few final updates from last month, with a preview of what is to come in 2025!
🚀 Read "2024: Year in Review" - a summary of what we've been up during this busy year of change for The Turing Way.
🎄 Read our holiday greetings and plans for the new year.
To keep up to date with community events, you can also subscribe to our shared calendar here. 📅
If you're interested in keeping up in real-time, don't forget that you can always join our Slack workspace, or follow the project on Twitter/X, Linkedin, and Fosstodon.
Community News and Updates
Illustration by Scriberia showing community as a garden and members as gardeners. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.
Updates from December's Community Forum
The last community forum of 2025 was a special one, featuring celebrations across The Turing Way community to close out the year! ✨
Chaired by Malvika, we were joined by the new cohort of Software Sustainability Institute Fellows and celebrated our community members who were HiddenREF nominees and winners. Our attendees shared their personal highlights with each other, and the Working Groups provided updates and plans for their respective areas of work in the new year.
Watch the recording on YouTube.
Thank you for joining us in this new community forum format throughout this year. Community forums have allowed us to share insights, communicate updates, and invite collaboration on activities that shape our project and community. We are excited to host more such sessions next year with a focus on improving our governance and sustainability plans as a project and community.
Congratulations to the Software Sustainability Institute's 2025 cohort!
For over 10 years, the SSI Fellowship Programme has supported passionate individuals in research and software, empowering them as ambassadors of good practice to shape the future of research software.
This year's cohort includes many community members and frequent collaborators with The Turing Way community, working on a variety of important topics.
Congratulations Arielle Benett, Deborah Udoh, Ella Kaye, Esther Plomp, Jyoti Bhogal, Katherine McDonough, Nicky Nicolson and Rachael Stickland, among other fellows. Read more about the 27 2025 Fellows on the SSI website
They join a long list of collaborators and community members who are SSI fellows and collaborators! Read about them on SSI website.
HiddenREF Nominations for Working Groups
Congratulations to the Accessibility Working Group and Infrastructure Working Group for being recognised as "highly commendable" in The HiddenREF's 2024 competition!
Started in response to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that has informed funding allocations across UK's higher education providers since 2014, the HiddenREF project held first competition in 2021 to recognise all outputs for research.
The HiddenREF campaign has since showcased the diversity of research outputs in UK research, and the incredible people who work in hidden roles – from librarians to technicians, research software engineers to research administrators and managers – making vital-but-unrecognised contributions to research.
Nominations were submitted for our the Accessibility, Book Dash, Infrastructure and Translation and Localisation working groups to highlight the often invisible work they do in making our work more accessible, engaging, maintainable, and localised for different contexts, nominated under different categories.
Thank you to Alexandra Araujo Alvarez, Anne Lee Steele, Arielle Bennett, Batool Almarzouq, Brigitta Sipőcz, Danny Garside, Emma Karoune, Esther Plomp, Susana Roman-Garcia, Carlos Martinez, Jim Madge, Léllé Demertzi, Liz Hare, and Sarah Gibson for leading these efforts across the community working groups!
Watch the recording of the Award Ceremony on YouTube
Accessibility Policy
Screenshot) of The Turing Way Accessibility Policy
After two years of continuous work with the Accessibility Working Group, our Accessibility Policy is now live!
This work began in 2022, when Liz Hare and Andrea Sanchez Tapia gave two talks about Accessible Data Science at our November 2022 Book Dash. Over the following year, this evolved into the creation of the Accessibility Working Group. Throughout 2024, the Working Group has collaborated on various documentation for our Community Handbook and Guide for collaboration, as well as joined the Book Dash Organising Committee to develop accessible guidelines for contributions to the handbook.
The recently merged policy was reviewed by many community members over more than 1.5 year review process. Thank you to Alexandra Araujo Alvarez, Andrea Sanchez-Tapia, Arielle Bennett, Chi Zhang, Esther Plomp, Laurel Ascenzi, Harriet Sands, Jesica Formoso, Jim Madge, Léllé Demertzi, Malvika Sharan, Patricia Loto, Precious Onyewuchi, Richard Acton, Sara Villa, Saranjeet Kaur, Sophia Batchelor, and Tania Allard for your thoughtful engagement and feedback on GitHub issue and pull request.
We encourage you to read our Accessibility Policy in the ACCESSIBILITY.md in our Github respository, or in the Accessibility sub-chapter in our Community Handbook. We hope that this will be a resource for others building inclusive open science communities, and that this document will be a reference point as we continue to grow as open and accessible practitioners of open science.
A Practitioner's Hub event on "Open Source, Ethics & Innovation in AI" - 25 & 26 November
On 25 and 26 November, The Turing Way Practitioners Hub team — Malvika Sharan, Arielle Bennett, and Léllé Demertzi— hosted the "Open Source, Ethics & Innovation in AI" event. Part of the Innovate UK BridgeAI programme, the event welcomed speakers and participants, including the second cohort of Experts in Residence, who brought diverse perspectives on openness and ethics in AI from across various sectors.
- The keynote address was delivered by Chi Onwurah, MP (pictured above), Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee. She shared insights on how open source can democratise AI innovation, paving the way for a more inclusive and equitable future.
- Panels and workshops were hosted in collaboration with Turing members Aida Mehonic, Sofia Pires, Arcangelo Leone de Castris, and Christopher Burr.
- External partners included Nicholas Gates (OpenForum Europe), David Pérez-Suárez (UCL), Jacob Green (oGov), and Mariangela Mihai, PhD (Western Washington University).
- A special thanks to Alexandra Araujo Alvarez and Dominica D'Arcangelo for coordinating and ensuring the involvement of InnovateUK and BridgeAI partners.
Finally, we extend our gratitude to our online and in-person facilitators: Punita Maisuria, Anastasia Shteyn, Cassandra Gould van Praag, Emma Karoune, David Sarmiento Perez, Dannae Smith, and Giulia Tomba.
Full agenda can be found online and a report will be shared on our webpage.
Talks and Workshops
- Sarah Gibson gave a workshop on reproducible research at UniBasel ReproducibiliTea online on 21 November.
- Sophia Batchelor gave a Community Talk about The Turing Way at the RPY Conference 2024 for the NHS-R community on 22 November in Birmingham, UK.
- Anne and Anna Zanchetta gave an online talk about Open Mapping and The Turing Way at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap's Global Telemapathon on 4 December
Monthly Highlights: A Recap of The Turing Way's 2024 Journey
January
- The Turing Way kicked off 2024 by celebrating its 5th anniversary since its launch in 2019 (and we continued this celebration throughout the year!).
- We trialed and established bi-monthly community calls to onboard new members, creating opportunities for emerging leaders to share their knowledge and experiences with newcomers.
- The Infrastructure Working Group began organising resources across different GitHub repositories after transitioning to a new organisation.
- We also moved our newsletter platform to Buttondown, the platform that you're receiving this newsletter from!
February
- We hosted our first Community Forum of the year, a new community call to develop our governance and transparency as a project.
- We also deployed a new community consensus system, first used to choose our new domain name.
- Our team members participted in conferences across Europe at FOSDEM, State of Open Con, UNESCO's Software Heritage Symposium, and the OpenForum Europe's Open Source Policy Summit Forum. Malvika also participated in Data Science without Borders project kick off in Ethiopia, sharing The Turing Way resources, which she will support to adapt to African health research.
March
- The Turing Way was highlighted at the Alan Turing Institute's annual AI-UK showcase in London.
- The project was added to Digital Public Good registry by the Digital Public Good Alliance as "Open Content".
- Code for Thought podcast was released about Professionalising Data Science Roles, a sub-project of the community.
- The Practitioners Hub hosted their showcase event, closing the first cohort with publication of six case studies.
Group pictures from AI-UK attended by several members from The Turing Way team and community at the Alan Turing Institute.
April
- Our second Commmunity Forum was hosted, announcing the second call of the Practitioners Hub Experts-in-Residence cohort.
- We shared the three institutional “levels” to formalise governance in The Turing Way, helping guide our work with community, working groups and overall decision-making.
May
- At Collaborations Workshop at the University of Warwick, we hosted an anniversary party to celebrate five years of The Turing Way.
- Part one of The Turing Way Birthday podcast was recorded and relased by Code for Thought.
June
- We hosted our 10th Book Dash in June with 36 contributors, and a Fireside Chat on Accessibility supported by the Society of RSE.
- We celebrated the publication of Foreword of The Turing Way, draft for which has taken over 2 years to be reviewed and merged
An overview of decision-making in The Turing Way - illustrated by Kirstie Whitaker, represented by Community contributing via GitHub, Maintainer working and delivering on defined goals, and Constitutional level group symbolising the Steering Council.
July
- Part two of The Turing Way 5-year anniversary podcast was released by Code for Thought.
- Members of the team attended the OSPOs for Good Summit in New York to advocate for the broader use of open source.
- The CSCCE Case Study on use of Github for collaboration was released.
August
- While The Turing Way team used this month to take a break from hosting community calls, many members of the Turing's Community Management team also delivered talks and workshops for the Turing's Widening Participation summer experience programme.
September
- The second cohort of the Practitioners Hub kicked off with 20 organisations and 40 Experts in Residence.
- We welcomed our Research Project Manager (RPM), Léllé Demertzi, while Alexandra Araujo Alvarez, our previous RPM transitioned to her new role as Senior Research Community Manager for BridgeAI.
- We hosted a Fireside Chat in collaboration with Dragonfly Mental Health, and members of the team attended the Festival of HiddenREF in Bristol, UK.
The Practitioners Hub event in September announced the second cohort with 20 organisations who will engage with the BridgeAI intiatives while recieving training and support from The Turing Way team.
October
- In October, we hosted a Community Forum where Kirstie announced her departure from the Turing institute, and what that means to The Turing Way. Especially, she emphesised that the Turing will support some key roles required to manage community activities, while we work to strengthen the multi-stakeholder leadership model, that will provide pathways for more members to support long-term sustainability of the project. Read more here.
- While Malvika has assumed the project lead role, we also welcomed Arielle to the project team in her new role as Senior Researcher for open source practices.
November
- Our November Book Dash was hosted virtually, with two local hubs: in London and the Netherlands.
- The Practitioners Hub also hosted two-day event on open source, ethics and innovation in AI, with keynotes, panels and workshops with over 80 participants.
- We celebrated nominations for our Working Groups, and congratulated the Infrastructure and Accessibility Working Groups for being recognised as highly commended efforts by HiddenREF.
December
- After two years of collaborative work, our accessibility policy was merged, a hard work led by the accessibility Working Group.
- Our final Community Call of the year was hosted on 12 December, that celebrated HiddenREF nominations and highly commended awards for our Working Groups, and congratulated new SSI fellows from within the community.
A picture from the 5th year birthday workshop at Collaboration Workshop 2024. We are so delighted to have such a fantastic landmark year of The Turing Way with you.
In 2024, we delivered a whopping 56 talks and workshops worldwide, hosted two community-led Book Dash events, concluded first cohort and started with a bigger second cohort of Practitioners Hub and made significant progress in solidifying governance of The Turing Way with working groups.
Although we haven't spotlighted individuals behind these spectacular achievements in this newsletter, we encourage you to explore the diverse insights and contributions published in our previous newsletters, archived on Buttondown.
Reflecting on 2024 of Gratitude and Resilience, and Looking Ahead to 2025
Dear The Turing Way Community,
As we reflect on 2024, we are deeply grateful for all of you. This year has been undeniably challenging, with economic instability, escalating humanitarian crises, devastating climate events, and growing concerns about the risks of AI in all these areas and beyond. These challenges have profoundly impacted communities around us in various ways, and highlighted the importance of solidarity, resilience, and collaboration.
In the midst of these challenging world events, The Turing Way community members have shown incredible kindness, support, and solidarity toward each other. With a range of ongoing initiatives to advance open science, reproducibility, and ethical data practices, this year we embraced the pace required for important work such as accessibility policy, community governance resources, and infrastructure maintenance in The Turing Way. Thank you for creating such an open, collaborative, and inclusive environment where people feel welcome and encouraged.
Whether through discussions in Collaboration Cafés, events, Slack, or GitHub, or improving access to The Turing Way resources, your contributions have made this community stronger.
Looking ahead to 2025, we’ll build on this progress, deepening collaboration and conversations around culture change and governance that prioritise transparency, courage and inclusivity.
We are excited for what lies ahead and grateful to have you with us on this journey. Thank you for everything you've done and for your continued support.
We wish you a restful end of the year and look forward to seeing you in 2025!
With heartfelt appreciation,
Malvika and Anne
On behalf of The Turing Way Team
If you'd like to contribute to the next newsletter, please email Anne Lee Steele at asteele@turing.ac.uk! Feel free to send her a message on Slack, or book some time in on Anne's calendly) to say hello.
Did you miss the last newsletters? Check them out here.