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Presented at Data Justice Lab Conference 2023 at Cardiff University. This project presents a comparative ethnography of two open knowledge projects from both operational and observational perspectives: more than 1 year supporting an open source series of guides for data science called The Turing Way as a Community Manager, as well as more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork on OpenStreetMap for dissertation research about humanitarian mapping, a data-making project often called the “Wikipedia of maps”. While both projects desire to “do good” through open source, this paper seeks to untangle the ethical, economic, and cultural forces that collide to create these two projects, untangling how they do and do not align with the notion of data justice. While existing studies of digital communities (open knowledge communities and otherwise) have focused on the socialities they engender or labor they require, they tend to forget the bureaucratic apparatuses that have emerged to govern them, both implicitly and explicitly (Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2008). In parallel, studies of humanitarianism have focused on the ethics they operationalize, or the technologies that are mobilized in turn, but often at the expense of engaging in the wider spectrum of social and economic life that they enable (Cross, 2013; Redfield, 2012, 2016a; Scott-Smith, 2013, 2016a, 2019; Ticktin, 2014a). While this project draws upon these overlapping strains of research, it seeks to push the debate surrounding data justice in an ethnographic direction about the bureaucratic apparatuses that enable its perpetuation, enabling understandings of “openness” in a variety of forms, scaffolded by theories of bureaucratic technology, infrastructure, political economy, and humanitarianism.

Presented at 'Moving frontiers of the demos: Enfranchisement, youth participation, and digital technologies' conference in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies on 12-14 June 2023 Where does “open source” fit into discussions around (digital) democracy? When we discuss “digital transformations” by and for communities, from where –and for whom –are these transformations developing? In the present day, the notion of “open” seems to be ubiquitous: from OpenAI’s groundbreaking ventures in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) (1), to the European Commission’s upcoming “open source software strategy” as a part of their Cyber Resilience Act (2). While these parallel developments highlight the urgency of the current discourse, the socio-technical histories of “open” have a much longer history that are important to untangle in order to understand both their frictions and cohesions (3). This presentation will aim to untangle these threads, as informed by ethnographic study of two open source communities: more than one year supporting an open source series of guides for data science called The Turing Way as a Community Manager, as well as more than 1.5 years of academic fieldwork with OpenStreetMap, a data-making project often called the “Wikipedia of maps”. While this work draws upon these overlapping strains of research, it seeks to push the debate surrounding digital democracy and digital democracy in an ethnographic direction, untangling understandings “openness” as they are lived in real time, as scaffolded by theories of bureaucratic technology, infrastructure, political economy, and humanitarianism.

Thursday 1 June, 12:30 – 13:30: The Turing Way – A Collaborative Guide to Data Science and Research With Anne Steele, Community Manager The Turing Way is an open-source, community-led, and collaboratively-developed book for data science and open research. This Lunch and Learn will discuss the evolution of the open source community, and introduce the project’s five guides on reproducibility, project design, collaboration, communication and ethics in research. This Lunch and Learn will be hybrid, with an option to attend in person. Please click here to register.

Talk was given at the OSPO++ Community Call on 25 May: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-the-turing-way-tickets-634204762517 The Turing Way is an open-source, community-led, and collaboratively developed project focused on making data science and research skills accessible, comprehensible and beneficial for the wider research community. The project brings people from diverse fields together to develop practices and learning resources; and to translate these tools and ways of working across cultural and disciplinary contexts. The resources are organized as an online book with over 250 chapters across five guides on reproducibility, project design, collaboration, communication and ethics in research. The project emerged in response to the crisis of reproducibility in science, amidst a growing movement for new ways of managing research data through initiatives such as the FAIR principles and other open source software projects. This talk will provide an overview of The Turing Way project and will also explore how this relates to open source maintenance within open science and research culture. Schedule Our community call agendas run as follows: Intros and news from the Network Presentation / Overview of the theme of this session Community Discussion Wrap-up Speaker Bio Anne Lee Steele is the Community Manager for The Turing Way project at The Alan Turing Institute, where she facilitates a collaborative resource for reproducible data science; and supports an open source community in developing practices for researchers and practitioners around the world. Anne has worked with a variety of organizations in the open ecosystem, including the Internet Society, Wikimedia Deutschland, and the Open Knowledge Foundation. She also has a background in data journalism and the education sector. Anne is passionate about the capacity for open source practices to make research more accessible, collaborative, and inclusive. &nbsp

On 19 May, 16:00-16:30 London time (UTC+1) (in your timezone) we will be hosting Anne Lee Steele, Community Manager for The Turing Way project at The Alan Turing Institute. Anne will overview the cluster of efforts emerging and the different types of pathways at The Turing Way, an open source community-driven book on reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. The format of the talk is: 5 min - Intro 15 min - Presentation 10 min - Q&A (not recorded) We will facilitate open discussions in the Q&A with attendees to learn about their perspectives on the topic via a shared document (links shared upon registration). This event is being co-hosted by EDS book - a computational notebook community for Open Environmental Science, Climate Informatics - an open community interested in research combining climate science with approaches from statistics, machine learning and data mining and Environmental Data Science Journal - part of Cambridge University Press and Assessment designed to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence and data science to enhance our understanding of the environment, and to address climate change. &nbsp

The Turing Way - an open guidebook for data science and research - emerged in response to the crisis of reproducibility in science, amidst a growing movement for new ways of managing research data: through initiatives such as the FAIR principles and various open source software projects. As the movement has matured, it has also entered a new phase that has asked different questions about its sustainability, governance, funding, and diversity. As these questions have evolved, so has the wider landscape of technology more broadly, pushing back against the ethos of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ as questions of maintenance come to the forefront. This talk discusses open source maintenance in the context of The Turing Way, within computational communities and open science more broadly: extending into the culture of research itself. It discusses the tensions between developing new ideas to change research culture and the cultivation of maintenance as an ethos for developing, contributing to, and participating in an open source community like The Turing Way.

Keynote speech, presented at the one-day symposium, "Data Hazards, Ethics and Reproducibility One-Day Symposium", held in person at the Alan Turing Institute HQ (London), and online on Friday 10th March 2023.

The Turing Way is an open-source, community-led, and collaboratively developed project on making data science and research skills accessible, comprehensible, and beneficial for a wider research community. We bring together individuals from diverse fields and expertise to develop practices and learning resources that can make data research comprehensible and useful for everyone, as well as translate these tools and ways of working across cultural and disciplinary contexts. These resources are organised as an online book with over 250 chapters across five guides on reproducibility, project design, collaboration, communication and ethics in research. This talk will introduce The Turing Way project, how it has evolved over time, and invite participants to get involved. All questions, comments, recommendations, and discussions are facilitated through an online GitHub repository.

The Turing Way Book Dash events are a less intense version of Book Sprints, where participants collaboratively work on The Turing Way book synchronously to develop new chapters and review/edit existing ones to make them more accessible, comprehensive and up-to-date. They also contribute to enhancing the project by improving the ways we work in the community and take lead on accomplishing different tasks or subprojects. The November edition of Book Dash featured 19 invited contributors, 6 committee members, 14 online working sessions, four discussions and social events, and two community share-outs. In the past, we have organised 1-1.5 day long Book Dash events in person or partially remote. However, since November 2020, we have been hosting Book Dashes online and with multiple short co-working called development sessions spread over 5 days for flexible participation by members. We developed this format to allow people in different time zones to participate with the same efficiency and equitable support. This involved creating multiple small development sessions throughout the day, adding dedicated sessions for informal social interactions, developing shared documents with all the information, providing support funds to ensure that everyone can comfortably participate and hosting a pre-event call to communicate these resources to everyone. Like the previous Book Dash in 2022, this time we also had local hubs hosted in London and Amsterdam with modification introduced for the in-person participants to plan their day offline.

Early Career Keynote given at RSECon Asia-Australia 2022

Presentation given on 1 September 2022 by Hari Sood during aLunchtime Session for Early Career Researchers organised by the Research Support Facility of the AI for Multiple Long-Term Conditions programme. This presentation introduces The Turing Way: a book, community and global collaboration aiming to "make collaborative, reusable, and transparent research too easy not to do". It is based on a previous workshop, Git Good: Using GitHub for Collaboration in Open Source Communities, created by Hari Sood, Sophia Batchelor, Anne Lee Steele and Esther Plomp presented at CarpentryCon 2022.

This presentation expands an understanding of humanitarian mapping from an ethnographic perspective, seeking to understand the complex mechanics behind this confluence of humanitarianism, technology, and crowdsourced labor. It seeks to scaffold a notion of the “open source mapping supply chain”, situating both humanitarian mapping and OpenStreetMap itself within a larger ecosystem of commercial, humanitarian, open source, government, and other actors in developing geospatial-related technologies.

The Turing Way is a community-led resource for reproducible, open, collaborative, and inclusive data science. Created by over 300 contributors, The Turing Way uses open source tools to enable people to collaboratively write chapters, build and maintain resources, as well as share their skills and ideas around best practices. Core to this is the version control tool, Github which supports The Turing Way’s collaborative practices. In this workshop, co-facilitators from The Turing Way Community will introduce participants to using GitHub as a tool to support collaborative documentation-writing and knowledge sharing. They will discuss the importance of open community practices in building and maintaining collective resources, and learn about the importance of different roles in open source documentation communities like The Turing Way: including that of maintainers, reviewers, and translators. Participants will gain hands-on experience in working collaboratively during the workshop by contributing to the The Turing Way project. A shared document will be used for collaborative note-taking, capturing feedback and learnings.

This document is shared under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6841867. Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6841867. Attributed to the The Turing Way community and individual contributors. Further to the adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science in November 2021, UNESCO launched a Global Call for Best Practices in Open Science. Website with more information: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-launches-global-call-best-practices-open-science The Turing Way (https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/welcome) team (email: theturingway@gmail.com) led a workshop to facilitate discussion and put together a community solicited recommendations on the 2-3 (out of seven) selected priority areas. This session will be facilitated during The Turing Way Collaboration Cafe. Session facilitators: Malvika Sharan, Anne Lee Steele, Esther Plomp, Arielle Bennett. The Turing Way (https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/welcome) is an open source, open collaboration and community driven guide to best practices in data science and research. The Turing Way is hosted and supported by the Tools, Practices and Systems of The Alan Turing Institute. Editor: Malvika Sharan Workshop Contributors/Affiliation/Socials/ORCID Patricia Herterich / DCC, University of Edinburgh / @pherterich Alina Popescu / King’s College London Law School Arielle Bennett / The Alan Turing Institute / @biotechchat Emmy Tsang / Invest in Open Infrastructure / @emmy_ft Esther Plomp / Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Applied Sciences / @PhDtoothFAIRy Anne Lee Steele / Alan Turing Institute / @aleesteele Eirini Zormpa / The Alan Turing Institute / @eirini_zormpa Emma Karoune/ The Alan Turing Institute / t - @ekaroune Vicky Hellon / Alan Turing Institute / @vickyhellon Alejandro Coca-Castro / Alan Turing Institute / @alejo_coca Batool Almarzouq, OSCSA/KAIMRC, Twitter: @batool664

These days, everyone seems to trying to harness the power of the crowd. Amnesty International’s “Decoders” brings together “digital volunteers to tackle human rights abuses around the world”. Bellingcat crowdsources information for their online investigations, and has transformed their newsroom into an open source project. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has long altered how research is conducted through their crowdsourcing marketplace. These tools have paved the way for new kinds of journalism and research, where theoretically anyone can contribute to projects from anywhere around the world. However, while crowdsourcing has grown as a source of data, visual storytelling has usually been left out in the process. Online tools like Datawrapper and Tableau have made data visualization easier than ever, but because storytelling with data is computationally expensive – and usually custom-made for the story – the crowdsourcing process has usually been completed before it is turned into a visual design. They don’t usually walk in lockstep with each other. This talk will attempt to bridge this gap, if only just a little. It reviews a project called supply-chains.us, which is building a sustainable open-source database that anyone can contribute to, with an integrated visualization that updates over time. This talk will describe how the project was built, why visual storytelling is important for research, and how open-source projects can be an opportunity for collective storytelling.