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Overview

Every team, every project and every collaboration has people who participate in a way that inspires others in the team to join efforts and accomplish shared goals together. These people take initiative, guide others, ensure that diverse perspectives are involved, and that everyone has the right opportunity to build on each others skills and expertise.

This is called leadership and these people are leaders. Specifically, in the context of open source/science and community projects, we call this phenomenon ‘Open Leadership’. This is also applicable to data science, research communities, and collaborations more broadly.

In formal terms, leadership is defined as specific skills “encompassing the ability of an individual or organisation to lead or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organisations.” (source: Wikipedia). Open leaders might not necessarily be the same people who have formal authority or the title of institutional leaders. Nonetheless, open leaders work towards facilitating an environment that empowers others to collaborate equitably, identify shared challenges, develop shared goals, and address them with a shared sense of agency. In the long term, their work contributes to the success of projects, and institutional goals and hence should be rewarded with formal titles, recognitions, and positive culture change.

Open Leadership Framework

The Turing Way embodies Open Leadership and has its origin in Mozilla’s Open Leadership Framework.

The Open Leadership Framework states that leadership is about involving members and mobilising communities to solve problems and achieve goals that are beneficial for everyone.

Individuals who lead their work (project, organisation, communication, resources) openly design different aspects of their work to promote openness and social good throughout their work life cycle.

The key principles of openness are: design, build, and empower for understanding, sharing, and participation and inclusion.

The emphasis is on ensuring that the members of an open project understand the project so well that the project can run without leaders because all the members are empowered to take on leadership tasks.

The Turing Way is built upon Open Leadership principles, which involve and support its members to apply these principles when developing content for its book or supporting its community.

Understanding Leadership in Data Science

Data science is broadly and inclusively considered as study of data to draw meaningful insights, contribute to the technological advances and benefit society by informing decisions across all sectors.

Workdcloud taken from wikipedia that highlights these words as more prominent than others

Figure 1:Words that stand out in a word cloud from the Wikipedia entry about leadership.

Theoretical frameworks from business schools, executive training and resources often explain, define, or assess leadership skills as traits such as “popularity, power, showmanship, or wisdom” which are not really the essence of leadership (Harvard Business Review). There is no such thing as a fixed set of leadership skills and not all great leaders have the same traits, strengths or leadership styles.

In the context of data science, where we strive to advance our knowledge through validated scientific methods based on data, talking about leadership, essentially a nuanced and fuzzy concept, is challenging to define. In data science and research, discussions and upskilling in leadership are extremely important as:

In this chapter, we explore different aspects of (open) leadership skills that are applicable in the data science and research contexts. After all, “technical skills are just one aspect of making data science research open, reproducible, inclusive and ethical for all” (as stated in the Welcome page of The Turing Way).

We hope that by discussing leadership here, we will:

In this chapter, we will introduce and discuss: