The Turing Way Community Updates and a Message from Founder Kirstie Whitaker
Explore The Turing Way Book and connect with us via our start page.
After a busy month leading up to the Book Dash week, we are excited to share updates as we ease into a slower pace in preparation for the year’s-end.
As The Turing Way community and project celebrate five years of continued success, we are ready to step into the next phase and are preparing for the exciting changes the new year will bring.
💌 A message from Kirstie Whitaker about her departure from the Alan Turing Institute and what it means for The Turing Way
📚💨 Watch recording from our October's Community Forum and the Book Dash's community share-outs
📣 Join this year's final Community Forum on 12 December
📝 Check out new chapters written by Book Dash participants and the Turing-Roche Community Scholars
Please note that the last Collaboration Cafe of the year will take place on 4 December.
As usual, you can find more updates and opportunities in the 'Community News' and 'Opportunities in The Turing Way orbit' sections below.
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, follow the project on Twitter, or join us on Fosstodon.
Community News and Updates
Message from our Founder, Kirstie Whitaker
This message was first shared on The Turing Way slack, at the October Community forum and discussed at the November Book Dash earlier this month. Kirstie shares this note below with the broader community and subscribers to our newsletter:
Hi everyone!
After almost eight years at the Turing, I’m going to move on to explore other opportunities. My last working day was 1 November 2024, I'll be on annual leave until 31 December 2024, and then hand in my card and email address ready for new adventures in 2025.
I am so proud to have founded The Turing Way as part of the £38.8 million AI for Science and Government funding in 2018.
Our 1000+ person global community have published more than 100 chapters to support improvements in practices related to reproducible research, project design, communication, collaboration and ethical co-creation.
Malvika Sharan is staying on as the lead investigator for the project on the Turing's side.
She'll continue to work with Anne, Arielle, Léllé and many others at the Institute to serve our community as best they can.
I hope very much that this isn't goodbye from me though.
The Turing Way has always been envisioned as a multi-stakeholder funded and community governed open source project.
I'm transitioning to being "just" a member of our community - with all the empowerment and opportunities that provides!
And I hope very much that I will build institutional and project connections to our work at a future role I take.
Thank you to everyone here who has influenced my knowledge, skills, perspectives and empathy.
I have learned so much during my time at the Turing and I’m going to miss the incredible TPS team terribly.
I hope I won't miss all of you though.
I'm loitering around slack even more than I used to!
Say hello there, or email me at kirstie.whitaker@gmail.com, and see me at future Collaboration Cafes soon 👋 ☕ 🤗
Kx
Book Dash's Community Share-outs Videos are on YouTube
From 4 to 8 November, The Turing Way hosted its 12th Book Dash!
The week was a busy one, consisting of 20 contribution sessions, 3 preparatory sessions and 5 social sessions distributed across at least 5 time-zones.
Thank you to the Book Dash Planning Committee that has been meeting for months to review forms, applications, schedules, access needs and other logistics to ensure that things run smoothly, and for hosting throughout the week:
Alexandra Araujo Alvarez, Anne Lee Steele, Arielle Bennett, Emma Karoune, Esther Plomp, Goodnews Sandy, Jennifer Ding, Léllé Demertzi, Liz Hare, and Patricia Loto.
Thanks also to Richard Acton and Kirstie for stepping in to lead a few sessions last minute!
Kirstie also facilitated discussions on The Turing Way governance and led the Share-and-Tell (English) session, which has always been one of the event's highlights.
The Committee is now hard at work writing up our report summarising the event - which will be released by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, you can watch these recordings:
Community Share-out 1 or Share-out 2
Updates from the October's Community Forum
At the last community forum, Kirstie Whitaker announced her departure from The Turing Institute, marking a significant transition for the project.
She emphasised the importance of the open and distributed leadership that has been modeled by several key members of our community, driving the project's successful adoption and use by different organisations beyond the Turing.
Presentations from Esther Plomp (TU Delft), Lena Karvovskaya (VU Amsterdam), and Carlos Martinez (eScience Center, Netherlands) highlighted how their leadership have led their respective organisations to support community engagement and the ongoing development of The Turing Way.
Watch the recording on YouTube.
Chaired by Arielle Bennett, Kirstie and Malvika shared plans to formalise and strengthen governance, reinforcing this federated model to encourage more organisations to support sustainable engagement with The Turing Way.
Over the next months, they will be engaging with community around this topic to co-create resources and examples to guide the evolution of our governance process.
Project Delivery Team Update
The Turing Institute continues to support key roles required to support the community involvement, resource management and project maintenance: Malvika Sharan as Senior Researcher and project lead, Anne Lee Steele as Research Community Manager, and Léllé Demertzi as Research Project Manager.
Arielle Bennett will continue as part of the team in her new role as Senior Researcher, as described below.
Arielle Bennett to Join The Turing Way Practitioners Hub Leadership
We are excited to share that Arielle Bennett has been appointed a Senior Researcher - Open Source Practices.
She will join Malvika in leading and overseeing the delivery of The Turing Way Practitioners Hub in the coming years.
The Turing Way Practitioners Hub collaborates with industry partners to promote best practices in data science and AI, focusing on open source, open data, and reproducibility. Arielle is leading the delivery of the second cohort, which includes 20 organisations, primarily small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Arielle Bennett has been a core part of The Turing Way project delivery team for years, including in her previous role as a Programme Manager and an active contributor to the community.
You can read about her on our Contributors' Record.
New Chapter on Bias in Research Data
Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.
Congratulations to Jack Breen, who led the development of a new chapter on Bias in Research that was recently merged into The Turing Way.
Jack is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, former Enrichment Student at the Alan Turing Institute, and a Turing-Roche Community Scholar.
In conducting a systematic literature review, Jack identified that high risks of bias in several research areas significantly limit the applicability of scientific findings to real-world scenarios.
With the objective of increasing awareness and understanding of these factors, this new chapter offers strategies to mitigate risks and enhance the reliability of results.
Read the chapter in our Guide for Project Design.
Thank you to Vicky Hellon and Dr Tapabrata (Rohan) Chakraborty for reviewing the chapter.
You can learn more about the story behind the chapter on X/Twitter, Linkedin, or Fosstodon.
Community Features
Join us in welcoming the NHS-R Way to our network of collaborators!
The NHS-R Community started in 2018 to promote the use of R in the NHS and the community has grown rapidly ever since. The NHS-R Way handbook, building off of practices and infrastructure used for The Turing Way, the project documents how to improve open code sharing.
Learn more about the NHS-R Way in our Community Handbook.
We're so excited to see how the NHS-R way develops as a community of practice!
If you are working on a project that builds of practices from The Turing Way, we would love to hear about it! Please reach out to Anne or Léllé on slack, or email us at turingway@turing.ac.uk.
Brigitta Sipőcz awarded open source maintenance grant from NASA
Congratulations to Brigitta Sipőcz, Research Software Engineer at CalTech and co-lead of the Infrastructure Working Group, who has been awarded a grant from NASA to support her work with the open source project Astroquery.
NASA’s Open-Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries awards provide support for the sustainable development of tools freely available to everyone and critical for the goals of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.
Brigitta will be working on the maintenance of Astroquery, a set of tools for querying astronomical web forms and databases. Congratulations, Brigitta!
The Open Library features The Turing Way Community Management practices
Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, started by the Internet Archive project.
As the Communications Lead of the Open Library, Nick Norman cites using materials from The Turing Way as inspiration for their work on community building and was recently awarded the Anthem Award for Community Voices.
Read more on Linkedin - Congratulations Nick!
Join the RainbowR Book Club
rainbowR is a community that supports, promotes and connects LGBTQ+ people who code in the R language, and spreads awareness of LGBTQ+ issues through data-driven activism.
Their first ever book club is underway with the book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action by Kevin Guyan.
rainbowR is running the book club in two cohorts to accommodate a range of time-zones. Sign-up on their website.
The Turing Way Practitioners Hub and BridgeAI Partners
Join the upcoming Practitioners Hub workshop on 25 and 26 November
Join The Turing Way Practitioners Hub for a two-day workshop of debate, discussion and networking.
Day one will focus on open-source AI practices and technologies, exploring both regulatory aspects and opportunities open source can provide emerging companies to level the playing field.
On day two, the spotlight is on AI ethics, addressing crucial questions on transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI systems and services.
Register to join on the BridgeAI website
Join the upcoming BridgeAI event on 2 December
📢 Ready to take your company’s AI capabilities to the next level? Join The Alan Turing Institute, The Hartree Centre, and Digital Catapult on December 2 for an exclusive, hands-on interactive session, panel discussion and lightning talks, "How to Build an AI Team."
Designed for SMEs and AI leaders, this 3.5-hour session offers invaluable insights into:
Assessing your company’s AI adoption readiness
Addressing AI skills gaps and the competencies needed for success
Building and scaling a team that meets strategic AI goals
Register soon to ensure your place in this transformative session
Upcoming events
📅 Check out our new events calendar to learn more about what is happening in the community.
✨ If you are attending an event and would like to meet folks from across the community, please include that in this pad.
Recurring Community Events and Calls ☕
Hosted all throughout the month, our recurring community calls are important and engaging spaces where you can learn more about The Turing Way!
Some require sign-ups (📝) and some don't (✅), but absolutely all are welcome to these calls! ✨
📝 Onboarding calls: These calls are hosted every two months, join us to connect with other new members of the community and learn more about the project! Join us in the new year.
📝 Community forums: The next call is on 12 December, 15:00-16:30 UTC+1 (in your timezone). Sign-up
✅ Collaboration Cafe: The next call is on 4 December, 15:00-17:00 UTC+1 (see in your time zone). Feel free to drop in to meet the community, do some focused writing, or otherwise -- more information on Etherpad.
✅ Coworking Calls: every Monday, 10:00 UTC+1 (see in your time zone). Find the joining link on this shared Etherpad.
✅ Translation and Localisation Weekly Meetings: every other Wednesday at 14:30 UTC+1 (in your time zone). These calls are for co-working on translation and localisation efforts across several languages, and for learning more about the work of the team. Join the #translation channel on Slack for more.
✅ Infrastructure Monthly Meetings: every second Tuesday of the month, at 16:00 UTC+1 (in your time zone). These calls are for co-working on infrastructure support, and for learning more about the work of the team. Join the #infrastructure channel on Slack for more.
✅ Accessibility Monthly Meetings: every second Monday of the month, at 17:00 UTC+1 (in your time zone). These calls are for planning monthly sprints and co-working on access-related chapters and upcoming guide. Join the #accessibility channel on Slack for more.
Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.
It's been a busy few months of talks by and with community leaders. As always, you can find an ongoing record in our Zenodo Community page.
Recent events
Book Dash Planning Committee
Emma Karoune, Alexandra Araujo Alvarez, Liz Hare and Esther Plomp led the Pre-Book Dash Onboarding Calls on 22 & 23 October.
Arielle Bennett and Anne led the Pre-Book Dash Github training on 28 October.
Goodnews Sandy and Anne led our Onboarding call on 30 October.
Léllé Demertzi, Arielle, Liz and Anne facilitated our Community Share-outs on 8 November.
Talks and Workshops
Emma Karoune gave a talk titled "The Turing Way: Crediting contributions and supporting wider recognition of diverse data science roles" on 30 September at the BioImaging UK Meeting: Zenodo link
Liz Hare gave a talk titled "I'd Rather Be Talking About Science: Advocating for Inclusion and Accessibility in Open Science Communities" at Big Team Science on 9 October, where she highlighted her work with The Turing Way: Slides
Martin O'Reilly spoke about The Turing Way as a part of his keynote titled "Building effective research communities" at the Office for National Statistics Research Capability 2024 event on 7 November.
Following Martin's talk, Cassandra Gould van Praag and André Piza led a workshop at the Research Cabability event about The Turing Way and Research Community Management 101 highlighting important concepts and frameworks from their recent preprint on community management. Zenodo link.
Malvika Sharan delivered an opening keynote at the CarpentryConnect 2024 in Heidelberg organised by EMBL's Bio-NT project and The Carpentries community on 12 and 13 November. Title of her talk was "Carpentering Communities: Lessons from working in Open Science". Zenodo link
Malvika delivered another keynote at the SciLifeLab Data Driven Inititive's annual conference hosted in Stockholm on 13-14 November. Invited by the Head of Open Science, Christoper Erdmann, she presented her talk under the title "Open science for community-centered adoption of data science and AI: Insights from The Turing Way". Zenodo link
Opportunities in The Turing Way Orbit
Open Research Devroom at FOSDEM 2025
The Open Research Devroom team invites developers and users of open tools and technologies used in a research and investigation context to contribute to the 2025 edition of FOSDEM, the largest open-source conference in Europe.
🔗 Learn more on the Open Research website and submit by 1 December 2025: https://research-fosdem.github.io/
FOSS Backstage 2025
The seventh edition of FOSS Backstage will take place in Berlin (and online) on 4th and 5th March 2024.
The two-day conference will bring together industry representatives in Berlin to discuss and learn all about the FOSS community and compliance.
At FOSS Backstage, the stage belongs exclusively to the non-technical aspects of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
At the conference, you’ll meet community leaders, FOSS practitioners, executives, developers, and technologists, among many other stakeholders in the field.
The conference will cover topics ranging from managing thriving communities to navigating the legal landscape.
Submit on the FOSS Backstage website: https://24.foss-backstage.de/index.html
AI-UK
The next AI-UK annual showcase will take place on 17-18 March 2025.
The Alan Turing Institute's national showcase of data science and artificial intelligence, AI UK, is back again in 2025. AI UK at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre (QEII) will feature a large indoor exhibition of hands-on scientific demonstrations alongside thought-provoking sessions, workshops and networking opportunities. The exhibition will demonstrate the best in innovation across the ecosystem, providing engaging and interactive moments for AI UK attendees to connect, share and learn.
Submit on the Turing website: https://www.turing.ac.uk/work-turing/ai-uk-2025-call-demonstrations
Jobs in our orbit
We have a number of job openings to join different teams at the Turing.
View and apply online for current vacancies via our careers site.
A few positions to check out:
Data Scientist, AI Security - Defence and Security
⏰ Apply by 25 November 2024
Research Associate, Responsible Defence AI Exploitation
⏰ Apply by 24 November 2024
Events and Engagement Coordinator
⏰ Apply by 17 November 2024
Other opportunities
Fellowship: The Maintainers: Impact Fellowship
⏰ Apply by 21 November 2024
📍 Location: Remote
Fellowship: School of Commons: Fellow
⏰ Apply by 1 December 2024
📍 Location: Remote, with a supervisor based in The Netherlands
Fellowship: School of Commons: Fellow
⏰ Apply by 1 December 2024
📍 Location: Remote, with a supervisor based in The Netherlands
Job: Green Algorithms: Various (3 researchers, 1 software engineer, 1 project coordinator/community manager)
⏰ Apply by 25 November 2024
📍 Location: Remote
Job: Eating Disorders Clinical Research Network: Statistician
⏰ Apply by 1 December 2024
📍 Location: London, UK
Job: eLife Science: Ambassador Programme
⏰ Apply by 22 November 2024
📍 Location: Remote
Volunteer: Carpentries: Board of Directors
⏰ Apply by 20 November 2024
📍 Location: Remote
For more events, subscribe to the Open Research Calendar.
Get involved + Connect with us!
You are welcome to join The Turing Way community, and learn more about the project.
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.