Community Forums

Starting in 2024, The Turing Way delivery team is hosting public community calls that bring together different stakeholders, community members and leaders from across the project.

These calls will serve as a platform for the community to come together, share accomplishments, and discuss governance-related matters.

Motivation for Organisation¶

Community Forums are our public-facing calls to share updates from across different levels of governance in The Turing Way.

From June 2022 to September 2023, the Project Delivery Team hosted a regular meeting for the members working at the Maintenance Level under the title Core Community Meetings with 30 people working across different Working Groups. These meetings, although not open to the broader community, discussed community-wide projects and reported updates broadly via our newsletters.

As the community has grown, decision-making processes and structures have also needed different levels of formalisation and transparency, which is why instead of closed meetings, we opted for regular community-wide Community Forums starting in 2024. Modelled off a political town hall event, these online sessions are an opportunity to better understand activities across the project and how decisions are made. Our aim is to leverage the expertise across our community in reviewing our processes and recommend improvements. These calls are a mix of celebration, feedback, and opportunities to build connections with other organisations and initiatives around the world. Community Forums are also used for getting new or returning community members informed, and actively involve them in discussing governance processes within The Turing Way.

In 2025, Steering Committee Meetings, drawing chairs of Working Groups and representatives from projects carried out in collaboration with The Turing Way will be hosted to formalise Constitution Level governance.

These calls utilise a more traditional meeting format, with prepared agenda items and particular issues to be voted on by different members. These calls also facilitate decision-making in a more decentralised format, such as by inviting feedback asynchronously via GitHub issues/discussions from the organising body of an initiative (such as Working Group, funded projects or informal interest groups) within The Turing Wau, relaying feedback from the Maintainer to the Constitutional Level, or the Community Level and vice versa (see: Liberating Structures).

Currently, these calls are hosted in English and recorded for use by participants. These calls also involve live discussion, screen-sharing, and other interactive activities that may be internet bandwidth-intensive.

Format of call¶

The current format of the call is as follows, and will likely evolve as the community needs to evolve alongside them.

Call #1 (Feb 2024)¶

Archived notes and resources¶

Collaborative notes, capturing feedback and highlights are archived on the governance GitHub repository. Slides are published on Zenodo and linked to the repository.