The core team call was initiated to formalise different parts of The Turing Way project and community, as well as initiate the process of decentralised decision-making and governance within the project that went beyond the guides specifically to other types of work.
This chapter also documents this evolution and reason for retiring this call below.
Motivation for organising¶
These calls were initiated by the Research Community Manager (in 2022, then Anne Lee Steele) in June 2022 in order to formalise, recognise, and celebrate specialised work and/or roles within the project. At the time, this included volunteers to the project across institutions internationally, as well as employees of the Alan Turing Institute based in the United Kingdom, specifically those based in the Tools, Practices and Systems (TPS) Programme which hosts The Turing Way project.
Evolution of call¶
The development of working groups within the project has operated in parallel with the “Core Team meeting”. This process will be detailed more fully in another chapter within the Community Handbook.
The first two core team meetings in June 2022 and September 2022 focused on the formalisation of the team as the “Core Team” of The Turing Way.
In June 2022, the types of work being formalised within the project was related to Translation and Localisation (which had begun in prior years). Simultaneously, the Turing’s TPS team had also expanded significantly with Research Application Manager (RAM), Research Community Manager (RCM), and Research Project/Programme Managers (RPMs) roles whose contributions to the project were not clear, though written into their job descriptions. At this call, the proposal was made to trial working groups within the project under three themes: authors & reviewers, infrastructure maintainers, and trainers and mentors – formalising streams of work that already existed in the project, following the translation and localisation process. This call announced a trial, and a call for volunteers from the existing core team to iterate on the format in the following months.
These three working groups were incubated and began to meet and self-organise in the following months. In September 2022, the second “core team” meeting was organised to receive feedback from participants about the process of organising formally as working groups, as opposed to informally as different initiatives. Feedback was collected about the process of working groups at this call, identifying the need for personnel and organisational support, as well as projects (such as transition from github repository to organisation, website and url, and other needs).
At the January and March 2023 core team calls, drafts were shared about the status of governance within the project – documenting the status of the incubated working groups. Around this time, work around accessibility began to formalise within the project. The “reviers and editors” and “trainers and mentors” working groups were retired, while the “infrastructure maintainers” (which became the Infrastructure WG) continued. We also created our first internal annual report which was shared during this call.
At the June 2023 core team meeting, further formalisation was done. An “accessibility working group” had solidified in the previous months (April 2023), in partnership and with volunteers from Metadocencia, while the “infrastructure” and “translation and localisation” working groups continued to consolidate their work. The Infrastructure Working Group lead on the transition to a Github organisation, which was completed in August 2023. The Translation and Localisation team were particularly supported to give talks that centered their work during this time.
At the September 2023 core team meeting, feedback was shared explicitely about decision-making within the project, sharing feedback about which decisions were blocked and/or needed support from project leadership, the delivery team, and/or operational support from the project RCM or RPM.
Evolution of format of call¶
During the period of organising core team calls, the format was iterated on a few times. This was to account for the evolving nature of the team.
The following tables show the timed agendas for each call as they evolved. Generally, the time was organised around two core tasks: a series of status updates (either from project leadership, community manager, and/or working groups) and a discussion or feedback-gathering exercise. The call would start and end with a welcome, and close with a sharing of next steps.
Call #1 (June 2022)¶
| Duration | Activity |
|---|---|
| Start | 👋 Welcome |
| 15 mins | Introductions |
| 05 mins | The Turing Way status update |
| 10 mins | Open discussion |
| 15 mins | Future plans |
| 15 mins | Next steps |
Call #2 (Sept 2022)¶
| Duration | Activity |
|---|---|
| Start | 👋 Welcome |
| 10 mins | Introductions + Writing Exercise |
| 15 mins | The Turing Way project updates |
| 15 mins | The Turing Way Decisions for Team |
| 10 mins | Any Other Business |
| 5 mins | Action items & Next steps |
Call #3 (January 2023)¶
| Duration | Activity |
|---|---|
| Start | 👋 Welcome |
| 02 mins | Intros: New Team Members + Welcome back |
| 10 mins | 2022 in Review: Anne (RCM) and Alex (RPM) |
| 15 mins | WG/Team updates |
| 20 mins | Decisions for Team |
| 05 mins | Reflective: Writing Exercise |
| 05 mins | Next steps |
Call #4 March 2023¶
| Duration | Activity |
|---|---|
| Start | 👋 Welcome |
| 10 mins | Introductions + Writing Exercise |
| 15 mins | The Turing Way project updates |
| 15 mins | The Turing Way Decisions for Team |
| 10 mins | Any Other Business |
| 5 mins | Action items & Next steps |
Call #5 (June 2023)¶
| Duration | Activity |
|---|---|
| Start - 5min | 👋 Welcome & review of agenda |
| 05 mins | Check-in & starting question |
| 05 mins | Clarifying governance progress |
| 40 mins | Guided discussion for core team (05 min solo, 10 min small group you know, 10 min small randomised group, 15 min all the group) |
| 05 mins | Gathering references & suggestions for governance |
| 05 mins | Wrap up & Next steps |
Call #6 (September 2023)¶
| Duration | Activity |
|---|---|
| Start - 5min | 👋 Welcome & review of agenda |
| 05 mins | Check-in & starting question |
| 10 mins | Writing activity |
| 45 mins | The Turing Way Governance Exercise: “Three levels of decision-making” |
| 05 mins | Wrap up & Next steps |
Archived Notes¶
Archived notes from these calls can be found on the public HackMDs, Padlets, and/or on our Github repository.
| Date | HackMD, Padlet or Slides | Archived Github |
|---|---|---|
| June 2022 | HackMD | -- |
| September 2022 | HackMD | -- |
| January 2023 | HackMD + Slides | -- |
| March 2023 | HackMD + Slides | -- |
| June 2023 | HackMD + Slides | -- |
| September 2023 | Padlet | -- |
Reasons for retiring¶
Last updated: February 2024
These calls were retired in early 2024 due to changes in the governance structure of The Turing Way project, and the needs of the project more broadly.
- The boundaries of the “core team” were not well defined from the beginning
These calls were initiated during a period of significant growth for The Turing Way community and for the TPS team at the Turing, all of which were grouped under the category of “Core Team” of The Turing Way. While these two persona types (employee of the Alan Turing Institute and volunteer contributors to TTW) were broad, their needs and dynamics were different due to team and line management responsibilities. This lead to questions like:
- (For ATI employees): Do volunteers engage with the core team meeting as representing their role, or as a representative of their team? How did line management affect this responsibility?
- (For volunteers): How
- (For both): What was the “responsibility” of a core team member of The Turing Way?
The lack of clarity on “who” was a part of the core team begged the question of who was accountable for facilitating contributions or contributing directly to The Turing Way project. This “core team” call – in trying to address the needs of both of these groups, created a deadlock in decision-making and reinforced power dynamics within the project.
- The purpose of call evolved over time.
These calls were initiated as a process of formalisation within The Turing Way community. Even the act of gathering diverse participants from the project was initially identified as a need within the project.
As the community continued to grow significantly throughout 2022 and 2023 with new work packages and projects, the core team of the project that met at these calls grew alongside this, as did the need to address blocks for decision-making within the community. To address this, the Core Team Meetings evolved into a place for receiving feedback from across a wide range of community leadership within the project. Facilitated written exercises and verbal discussions during these calls enabled the gathering of this feedback.
Furthermore, this call, while it assembled community leaders from across the project, was also identified to be a closed space. The call was not open to observers from the wider community as well as to others from aligned communities. In other words, the call was closed to the “core team” from the beginning, and the next stage of the project required a more open forum where feedback and observation from the broader community and from aligned communities could be made possible.
The current reformatted call centres an open “community forum”-style call over the format of “closed core team meeting” space.
- The feedback received during the calls needed different meeting infrastructure to act upon it.
While these themes have been present throughout the entire process of organising the Core Team Meetings, during the two final Core Team Meetings in June and September 2023 in particular, the feedback received demonstrated strong needs for clarity regarding institutional support, decision-making, institutional association, staff capacity, funding, and more.
Because the feedback shared in both meetings demonstrated their urgency (and in many ways, repeated the same feedback in different forms), this reinforced the need to transition this space into another format in 2024 and required The Turing Way core delivery team to take different actions.
This informed what is currently ongoing documentation that aims to clarify the relationship between the Alan Turing Institute and The Turing Way project, Working Group needs and “how-to” guides, and the “Three-levels of decision-making” within the project.
The transition of the “Core Team Meeting” into a broader “Open Governance Forum/Call” has allowed for the development of possible “solutions” or documented much-needed clarifications for recurring questions within the project.