Ways of Working

The “Ways of Working” document provides an overview of how members of The Turing Way community collaborate across the three levels of governance.

For information about the members involved in the governance, including the Project Delivery Team, please refer to the documentation on governance roles.

This document offers high-level information on communication, community structures, and project management processes. For details, please refer to the Foreword, Afterword, and Community Handbook within The Turing Way book: book.the-turing-way.org/.

Communication¶

Below we have listed all communication channels used in The Turing Way. For details, please refer to the Communication Platforms chapters in the Community Handbook.

You can reach out to all members listed in our governance document by tagging them on GitHub issues or Pull Requests, or directly on Slack.

You can reach the The Turing Way Project Delivery Team by emailing turingway@turing.ac.uk.

Please join the fortnightly Collaboration Cafes, which are great places to discuss ideas for new contributions and to get started with making them.

Talks, presentations and recordings from different events are posted on our YouTube channel regularly.

Community Channels¶

• Email:
  • Institutional Email: turingway@turing.ac.uk
  • Gmail: theturingway@gmail.com
• GitHub Repositories:
  • Organisation
  • Book
• Newsletter
  • Buttondown
• Discussions
  • GitHub Issues
  • Slack Workspace
    • Channel details
• Social Media
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon/Fosstodon
  • Bluesky
  • Youtube

Regular Community Events¶

Hosted all throughout the year, our recurring community calls are important and engaging spaces where you can participate in The Turing Way!

Some require signing up (📝) and some don’t (✅). All members are welcome to join these calls! ✨

• ✅ Collaboration Café: These are online coworking spaces for everyone, hosted fortnightly from 15:00 to 17:00 UK time. Here you can meet others from the community, do some focused co-writing, or catch up with the Working Groups (Collaboration Café Chapter).
• 📝 Community forums: These calls are hosted every two months by the project delivery team to share governance-related updates with the community.
• 📝 Onboarding calls: These calls are hosted every two months by the community management WG to onboard new members of the community in the project (Onboarding and Offboarding Chapter).
• 📝 Fireside Chats: The Turing Way members collaborate with different communities to co-design and co-host Fireside Chat events that are informal yet structured discussions on topics of shared interests across research/data science communities (Fireside Chat Chapter).

Working Groups and Meetings¶

• ✅ Translation and Localisation Meetings: Every second Wednesday at 14:30 UK time, members of the Translation and Localisation Working Groups share this coworking space to carry out translation work across several languages, and support each other (Translation Chapter).
• ✅ Infrastructure Monthly Meetings: Every second Tuesday of the month, at 16:00 UK time, members of the Infrastructure Working Groups work together on infrastructure-related maintenance and development efforts (Infrastructure Chapter).
• ✅ Accessibility Monthly Meetings: Every second Monday of the month, at 17:00 UK time, members of the Accessibility Working Group work together on access-related chapters and guidance for the community (Accessibility Chapter).

Group-Specific Events and Meetings¶

• Book Dash: These bi-yearly online or hybrid events are hosted by the Book Dash Working Group. These are less intense versions of Book Sprint, inviting members through an application-based selection process to work on specific areas of the book and/or community initiatives (Book Dash Chapter).
• Coworking Calls: Every Monday, from 11:00 to 12:00 UK time, the project delivery team and members from across different Working Groups use these coworking calls to catch up on their task lists (Coworking Call Chapter).
• Steering Committee Meetings: These meetings will be organised on a monthly basis for the members working together at the Constitutional Level. Dates and times will be decided with the members of the Steering Committee.

Commitments¶

All members, especially at the maintenance and constitution levels, commit to:

• making the implicit explicit by documenting their work
• abiding by the Code of Conduct in all community platforms and spaces where they represent The Turing Way
• following the contribution guidelines and keeping them up to date
• recording any new updates, exceptions or useful knowledge in project management and core documents needed to facilitate collaboration
• dedicating their time and expertise to fixing open issues either directly via GitHub or providing mentorship and support to community members and project contributors
• feedback on issues in open source software used throughout The Turing Way by opening an issue The Turing Way GitHub repo or other open source projects where this issue can be fixed
• Document and share any conversation from closed spaces (such as email, Slack, or 1:1 meeting) in a GitHub issue that could be useful for the community or community members in enabling their work in The Turing Way.

GitHub management¶

All members help triage open issues, review Pull Requests or address any questions raised on GitHub asynchronously. As most members do not work full time on The Turing Way, it might take some time until your query or contribution is addressed - especially if expert knowledge is needed. Don’t be afraid to nudge if they’ve not replied after a few days! :sparkling_heart:

Issues & Pull Requests¶

All members, especially at the maintenance and constitution levels, will:

• monitor open issues and Pull Requests on the project’s GitHub repository to identify if feedback, comments or connections can help address any concern or build on any suggested ideas/features.
• whenever possible, post about the issues and Pull Requests in public forums (newsletter, Slack, Twitter) to facilitate participation from new members in the community.
• review or assign a reviewer to open Pull Requests for review. This should be taken as an opportunity to connect contributors with specific interests, availability or technical skills that could be useful for the ongoing work.
• connect issues and Pull Requests where possible (for example, by mentioning ‘Fixes #[issue number]’ in the Pull Request description). By adding “closes #issue” or something similar in a comment on a pull request, merging the pull request will close the issue automatically.
• once completed, approve Pull Requests (for the contributors to merge them) and/or close issues immediately (if not linked to specific Pull Request) with a comment describing how it was addressed.
• when reviewing a pull request or commenting on issues, be specific, describe your ideas clearly, comment to request changes or make a pull request to the file that should be merged (please do not use the “request changes” option when reviewing Pull Requests).
• use your interactions on GitHub or other community spaces to provide support, mentorship and acknowledgement to our community of contributors.

Authorship and Contributorship in The Turing Way¶

Anyone who contributes to the book is considered an author of The Turing Way.

Our Community Handbook provides detailed processes and guidelines for Acknowledging Contributors. This section offers an overview and highlights the main points to ensure you have an initial understanding.

The first author is always The Turing Way Community.

You don’t have to have written a chapter to be listed as an author. Substantial contributions to the running of the project, for example, adding in (or improving) documentation on how someone can contribute to The Turing Way, hosted an event, given a talk or onboarded new members to The Turing Way, all count as core contributions warranting authorship.

Contributing small amounts over a long time, and thinking about the strategy for the project also count for authorship.

The Turing Way repository is archived on Zenodo at doi: The Turing Way Community (2025).

Each release has its own doi, and there is a concept doi (listed above) which always renders to the latest release.

For example v0.0.1 is available at Community et al. (2019), v0.0.2 is available at Community et al. (2019) and so on.

We release a new version every 6 months or if substantial updates to existing chapters are made, such as after Book Dash events.

Authorship is cumulative. If you have been added as an author on one release, you will stay as an author on all future releases.

Thank you for contributing to the Turing Way! We value your thoughtful participation and contributions to The Turing Way!

Resources¶

• Community Handbook
• Foreword
• Afterword
• Governance Overview
• Collaborators
• Sub-projects and Working Groups
• Glossary