Practical resources for formalising governance in open science communities and capacity building projects
Funding Area: Community governance / Gobernanza comunitaria
Problem Statement: Governance is critical for the success of open source projects. Many practices and resources exist to guide the formalisation of governance based on the project’s maturity levels and stakeholder types. RedHat, Open Source Guide and The Turing Way, among others, describe the concepts and general frameworks for how to formalise governance roles. GitHub also provides a template for Minimal Viable Governance (MVG). These recommendations from open source have been extended to open science projects as well. Although a good starting point, in the long term, this doesn’t end up meeting the diverse and practical needs of open science communities or capacity-building projects. Governance practices from community building and the theory of (digital) commons are more suitable for participatory projects like in open science. However, to apply this knowledge intentionally, every project goes through a time and labour-intensive process of desk research, process development and implementation activities with the involvement of community members from the start. However, these add massively to the workload of already under-resourced community leaders and contributors, who often work in a volunteer capacity. Therefore, in many high potential open science projects, governance work often doesn't get prioritised that ultimately ends up harming their communities. Here, we propose the centralisation of practical resources for formalising governance efficiently in open science community projects.
Proposed Activities: OLS is a non-profit organisation for open science training and capacity building. Since 2020, the OLS community has engaged 500+ open science learners and practitioners from both the Global South and North. With a core mission to embed EDIA, OLS is committed to improving the participation of marginalised and underrepresented communities, especially from LMIC in open science and research more broadly. The programme is managed by a small team of paid staff and resident fellows, each leading different areas of strategy and operations. Recently, the OLS team has onboarded a governance committee that involves 10 community leaders from diverse backgrounds, identities and expertise. These individuals represent a broad range of interests from partnering communities based in Argentina, Australia, Europe, India, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the USA (team and committee: https://bit.ly/ols-gov). The initial work that the committee has undertaken is the revision of the governance resources to establish decision-making frameworks that are equitable and inclusive of our community. They will collaboratively review and finalise resources between June 2023 and February 2024 with assistance from the OLS team. This work will involve facilitated discussion, coworking and establishment of decision making approaches in OLS, as well as identifying policies that should be created to further strengthen our governance process. In 2024, between March and October 2024 (timeline), we propose to follow this work up by creating a generalised version of our governance resources with recommendations to contextualise and enable practical reuse by open science community projects. Two committee members and two OLS team members will lead this short-term project in paid capacity with the support of this open infrastructure fund. The following activities and resources will be undertaken in this project: 1. Editing and publication of process documentation developed by the OLS governance committee with various governance roles and responsibilities with processes used by them. 2. Webinar series to introduce these resources to the wider open science community. 3. Workshops with external speakers from the open science community to invite their perspectives and discuss the adoption of governance resources in broader contexts. 4. ‘Governance clinic sessions’ to discuss challenging scenarios and collaboratively develop solutions for projects where the governance processes and resources would need to be planned differently. 5. Creation of additional frameworks and worksheets to allow mapping of these governance-related resources to various contexts. 5. Centralisation of all these resources to support community involvement and reuse of documentation by the broader open science communities 7. A GitHub template repository with important documents, templates and guidance (like roadmap, issue checklists, policy templates etc.) to practically adapt these resources to other projects.
Openness: The work proposed in this application aims to open up the governance resources, as well as learnings and outcomes from ongoing governance work in OLS. This will encourage and aid the formalisation of governance in open science communities and capacity-building projects. Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal (co-lead of RSE Asia Association) and Laurah Nyasita (co-lead of Bioinformatics Hub Kenya Initiative), who are OLS’ governance committee members, will work with OLS team members Malvika Sharan and Patricia Herterich, both assisting the ongoing governance work. They will collaborate to edit and publish resources, including process documentation, policies, templates and recommendations on a public GitHub repository and published with a DOI on Zenodo (removing any sensitive data), each with an open license for reuse (CC-BY 4.0). They will lead webinars, workshops and ‘governance clinic sessions’ with co-facilitators and experts invited from the open science community. The webinar and workshop resources including logistics and organisation details, video recording and documents (like meeting notes and worksheets) will also be shared on the OLS channels, and linked to the GitHub repository. The repository will be maintained for development through public engagement. Active participation and contributions will be invited via the aforementioned activities. All contributors to these resources will be given authorship and fair recognition in line with open science practices.
Challenges: Creating a centralised resource for open science governance is a huge undertaking, and will draw from the ongoing work within OLS that already builds on the existing resources in open science. The OLS team has already carried out desk research and are currently conducting the review and finalisation of decision making processes and documentation in the context of OLS. We anticipate that the first round of the revision from the committee will conclude in December with further review and feedback from the OLS community in February 2024, soon after we will begin the generalisation and sharing of OLS resources for adoption by other open science capacity-building projects. A delay in the OLS governance timeline may delay the project described in this proposal. However, since the governance committee-led review work will be done in sequential order for the multiple documentation and process resources, we don't foresee the delay being a blocker for starting the proposed work on time. Time constraints of people involved in this project, due to any unforeseen circumstances may also pose a challenge. The resident fellows onboarded in this project will require expert consultation and support, which will be provided by the OLS team, who will also draw mentoring, supervision and admin support needed to complete this project from OLS team and community. If additional support is required by the project, the project may run beyond October 2024 while we secure additional resources.
Neglectedness: OLS received funding to conduct research and sustainability work between 2022 to 2024. A part of this funding has been allocated to support the involvement of OLS community members with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences in establishing governance in OLS. All members will receive a small honoraria for their contributions to the governance committee, which in the next months will involve review and finalisation of governance resources in OLS. OLS team members supporting the governance work are already working beyond their paid capacity and anticipate the need for additional resources and funding to carry out the generalisation and centralisation of these resources for reuse by the broader open science communities We currently don’t have the funding to support this work equitably, while fairly providing mentoring and compensation for the work needed. Some national funding sources could be suitable for this work locally, but we are not aware of other sources of funding for carrying out this type of work through international collaboration, especially for the members of LMIC. We understand that the funding offered under the IOI’s Open Infrastructure Fund is limited. However, we think this will already allow engagement of diverse actors in facilitating the adoption of well-considered governance. The outcomes from this work will help ensure the overall success of open infrastructure and communities in the long term for their local contexts.
Success: This work will lead to easier access to governance resources for practical implementation. The success of the proposed work will allow more open science communities/capacity-building organisations reusing resources developed via this work in formalising the governance roles and processes. This can be measured through the engagement with the resources shared on GitHub and Zenodo, participation in webinars, workshops and ‘governance clinic sessions’, as well as direct collaboration with the team involved in this work. The metrics we can use are the following: - GitHub: Number of contributors. We will use the all-contributors bot to also record contributions of those who don’t ‘push’ directly on the repository but collaborate with other contributors. GitHub 'stars', 'forks' and ‘watch’ can also be used for drawing insights. - Zenodo: Views and downloads of resources can reflect the number of users reading and reusing resources shared in this project. - Zoom webinars, workshops and related sessions: number of attendees, the projects they represent as well as their demography through survey and feedback could also give us insights on our reach to communities, or lack thereof, helping improve approaches for future engagement activities. - YouTube: Recording from these sessions will be uploaded on OLS’ YouTube channel, number of views and basic analytics of viewers (such as countries) can also allow us to measure if the resources are being successfully used in the community well.
Total Budget: 20774 USD
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: RSE Asia Association, Bioinformatics Hub Kenya Initiative, OLS
LMIE Carveout: Applicants’ details provided below in the order: names (roles in the next section); working location; organisation they are representing in this proposal; summary of their organisations’ community. 1. Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal; India; RSE Asia Association; Open Source contributors from Asian countries including India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Japan, Sri Lanka, and South-East asian countries. 2. Laurah Nyasita; Kenya; Bioinformatics Hub Kenya Initiative; graduates and undergraduate students from Kenyan University with networks in other East and West African countries learning about open science and open source practices. 3. Malvika Sharan and Patricia Herterich; UK; OLS; 500+ open science practitioners from 65+ countries across 6 continents, who shared over 200 projects through OLS.
Team Skills: Laurah Nyasita is a bioinformatics researcher and a co-lead of BHKi in Kenya. She leads a podcast featuring community leaders from around the world sharing practical tips and examples of training, community building and inclusion of diverse participants in open science. Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal is a freelance statistician and research software engineer. She leads the RSE Asia association and serves as a community manager for Research Software Alliance in Asia (part time). She has been awarded for her community impact work for involving wider Asian researchers in the governance of her initiatives. Laurah and Saranjeet are members of OLS governance committee. Malvika Sharan is a co-director of OLS, who has been working in open science community building since 2015. She is leading the formalisation of governance in OLS and is involved in many open science projects in advisory and governance roles. She will be guiding and mentoring the work of resident fellows while providing strategic and operational support as needed. Patricia Herterich is a freelance data specialist and a resident fellow in OLS. As a Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) fellow herself, she is leading the OLS-SSI partnership to create fellowship opportunities for OLS’s international community. She is managing the OLS microgrants and honoraria, and supporting the ongoing governance work in OLS. Patricia will be providing both strategic and administrative support in this project.
How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)
Submission Number: 138
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