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What if you started a project with a thought like, “I have this great idea that I want to try on this public data!”? There is nothing to worry about if you’re the only one working on it. However, if you want to develop this project - you become responsible for making people feel included in your project.

As a ‘project lead’, you want to set up a welcoming and inclusive environment and create the first set of visions and goals for your collaborators. You cannot assume that everyone you collaborate with knows what is expected of them when they start to work with others on your project. Therefore, it’s important to set the right expectations from the beginning for your community, even though you might not have planned on having one (see more details: Sharan, 2020).

A Checklist for Planning Collaboration in Your Project

The checklist below will help you in making the process of establishing collaboration in your research project thoughtfully in a structured manner.

The practices listed here are derived from and limited by the experiences of the authors who participate in several successful Open Research communities and lead community-driven projects such as The Carpentries, Mozilla Open Leaders, Open Life Science and The Turing Way. While reading this chapter, please be aware that you may need to make adjustments for projects that may be very different in nature (for example, not entirely open source).

1. Choose a Communication Platform

2. Provide a Project Summary File:

3. Select a Code of Conduct:

4. Provide Contribution Guidelines and Interaction Pathways:

5. Create a Basic Management/Leadership Structure:

6. Provide Contact Details Wherever Useful:

7. Identify Failed Approaches, and Stop Them:

8. Have Documentation and Dissemination Plans for Your Project:

Two more points are crucial for ensuring the effectiveness of a collaborative project: addressing technical issues and valuing the importance of diversity in team building.

We have explained them in the next subchapters on Addressing Technical Issues and Valuing Diversity and Differences.

References
  1. Sharan, M. (2020). Open communities and promoting a culture of collaboration. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.3745008