Open Research Community Building

Introduction

Community Managers at the Turing invest in engaging, training and empowering a diverse group of researchers, research engineers, programme management, and business team members by fostering diverse communities of practice. They collaborate closely with others and identify where they can surface implicit knowledge and make information explicitly available so that everyone who wants to can participate. Through the active adoption of open research, reproducibility and collaborative approaches in data science projects, they contribute toward building interconnected systems of open source software, datasets, communities and processes.

Together as a team, we ensure that the research that happens at the Institute is created to be maintained, sustained, remixed and reused to make research and innovation more efficient and effective across the national and international data science ecosystem for commercial and public interest technologies alike.

Explaining the science

Open research is a way of conducting, producing and sharing research where everyone can access, reuse, build upon and distribute resources freely, without any barrier. The Turing Way is open research, open collaboration, and community-driven handbook on data science. We involve and support a diverse community of contributors to learn about, share and document recommendations and best practices to ensure that research and data skills are accessible, comprehensible and effective for everyone. Drawing from our work in The Turing Way, the Turing Community Managers facilitate the integration of reproducible, interoperable and collaborative processes in technical as well as the social infrastructure of our research projects.

Project aims

Members of Open Research Community Building team will ensure that research and data-driven AI solutions at the Turing use and build on open source tools, practices and systems by empowering people in the research community with open research skills. Building on the successes of the Tools, Practices and Systems research programme, Community Managers advance and scale the bidirectional flow of knowledge, resources and evidence for high-quality research within the Institute, as well as connect them across national and international data science communities. The aim is to empower Communities of Practice (CoP) at the Turing and more widely by granting them access to the skills and support they need to participate, collaborate and build something that is bigger than the sum of its part.

tps graphic

This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.

Applications

Members of this team are working on the following projects

The Turing Way

The Turing Way is an open source, open collaboration and a community driven handbook on reproducibility in data science and research. Dr Kirstie Whitaker, Director of Tools, Practices and Systems, and Dr Malvika Sharan, lead of the Open Research Community Building team, are the project leads. Anne Lee Steele is the community manager who facilitates collaborations across multiple community efforts in The Way Turing and beyond. Please see the impact report and contribute via online GitHub Repository.

AI for science and government (ASG)

Achintya Rao is coordinating the ASG Community and Collaboration Initiative. Facilitated by Achintya, ASG researchers will showcase their work, collaborate across the programme and exchange knowledge through co-authoring and publications of white papers. They will also produce series of communication outputs, including formal reports as well as impact stories, highlighting: the research contribution of the ASG programme, the unique role ASG plays in cultivating diverse endeavours and the influence of the Turing’s network-convening capability ASG's work. See the project developing on GitHub.

Turing-Roche Strategic Partnership

The 'North Star' of the Turing-Roche five year partnership is to enable the generation of insights to better understand patient and disease heterogeneity and its relevance to clinical outcomes at an unprecedented level of precision in order to improve clinical care. Vicky Hellon is designing and leading on multiple community activities to engage researchers and stakeholders in the programme to work towards our North Star. In the process, she will help build strong connections and collaborations between The Alan Turing Institute, Roche and the wider community.

DECOVID and Turing-RSS Lab

Dr Emma Karoune is the Senior Community Manager on DECOVID and Turing-RSS Lab. She is also a core member of The Turing Way, and sits in the Planning Committee of The Turing Way Book Dash.

Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases (EDON) Initiative

Dr Arron Lacey is the Senior Community Manager on the Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases (EDoN) initiative led by Alzheimer's Research UK. He hopes to use his experience in Machine Learning to help the EDoN initiative achieving it's goal of detecting cognitive decline 10-15 years before symptoms show in the brain, making current treatments more effective. EDoN aims to do this by building a digital toolkit consisting of mobile apps, Fitbit and cutting edge passive EEG monitoring to help detect signals of early cognitive decline.

Academic Engagement Team

Ayesha Dunk represents our connection with the Academic Engagement Team. She is the project lead for the Data Science and AI Educator's programme, that aims to embed data science and AI training across a range of disciplines, help overcome barriers to data science and AI training practices by empowering domain experts to become educators and stimulate the development of open and inclusive learning materials and curricula. She also chairs the data science education interest group.

The Turing Commons Team

Claudia (Clau) Fischer is a Research Assistant for Data Justice and Global Ethical Futures on the Ethics and Responsible Innovation Team at The Alan Turing Institute. At the the Turing, she is working on the Turing Commons project, as well as other projects which focus on the ethics of regulating data based and AI systems. In this team, Clau is helping explore way to strengthen TPS/The Turing Way's connection with the Turing Commons project.

Turing-Crick Strategic Partnership: Data Science for Biomedical Scientists Project

The Data Science for Biomedical Scientists training project is funded by AI for science and government. Led by Malvika, training materials developed through this project will enable senior researchers a foundational understanding of AI and data science in the context of biosciences. Furthermore, researchers will receive accessible resources to help manage, supervise and facilitate open and reproducible research for the wider biology community. This project massively reuses The Turing Way chapters and builds on The Carpentries and Open Life Science practices. See the project details and training materials on GitHub.