The Turing Way Book Dashes¶
A “Book Dash” is a shorter version of a Book Sprint, where participants work on The Turing Way book synchronously on the same day either in person or online. This event is organised for 1 to 1.5 days to allow attendees to learn about the project, meet other contributors, discuss their ideas and experiences, and collaboratively develop and enhance resources in The Turing Way book.
For many attendees, this is also the first time they get to contribute to a community-developed Open Source project.
Fig. 20 Making first pull request on GitHub. The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3695300¶
Inviting diverse contributions¶
As a community-driven guidebook, The Turing Way aims to co-create contents that are comprehensible and beneficial for the wider community of data scientists and researchers. Hence, The Turing Way specifically welcomes contributors from diverse fields, identities, and backgrounds who can propose ideas and work on the new aspects of an existing chapter or create new chapters in its guides.
All the contributors are managed through GitHub. Since many participants of book dash are new to the project and often new users of GitHub, the team members make sure that they take time to introduce the project and teach collaboration through GitHub before the book dash.
The skills and contributions that we invite at the book dash include, but are not limited to:
science communication and technical writing skills
examples and case studies of reproducible research
editing and reviewing of existing contents
technical tools and methods in data science
interest in creating contents on community building and collaboration
developing learning resources and reusable contents on ethics and AI
artistic skills for illustrations, sketch notes, and infographics
enhancing online aspects of the book (for example, CSS, layout, interactivity, continuous integration)
improving accessibility of the content and sharing accessibility principles in data science
data visualisation skills and best practices
storytelling skills that can help make our content more engaging
Support available for in-person, hybrid and remote events¶
All the book dashes so far have been organised for in-person participation in venues located in the UK (home country of the project). All the participants who need to travel to the event’s venue are offered financial support to cover their travel, accommodation, and related expense such as childcare or special accessibility requirements.
In the past, due to the funding model allocated to The Turing Way, we had to limit our selection to the contributors within European countries. To overcome this limitation, in the last book dash we experimented with partial remote participation where one of the participants coordinated with their team remotely. Based on the success of this hybrid format and further demand for more remote participation, we intend to organise this as a hybrid (partially remote) and complete remote events in the future.
In the case of hybrid and remote events, financial support will be available to support the accessibility requirements of the participants. This will include (but not limited to) temporary access to high-speed internet, childcare grant and live captioning during the event. Bursaries will be made available to rent or purchase small hardware such as headphones or webcam that can enhance the quality of participation at the book dash.
More resources on book dash¶
In this chapter, we discuss the application, participant selection and event preparation processes.
All the templates related to book dash is provided in the community template collection.