Creating collaboration guides for OS communities
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: Contributors are essential to the maintenance and growth of open-source (OS) projects, but most are geographically distributed and may never meet in person. Contributor leads (where they exist) often have limited time to onboard new members while supporting existing activities. While they are typically technical experts, they are not necessarily technical writers or community managers by training. We propose supporting contributor leads and other personnel with related roles but different titles (e.g., community managers) in learning how to create, maintain, and share contributor guides (a.k.a. community playbooks) that outline how their members work together. This documentation can be focused on norms for the project’s core team, developers, or users, as required. Our target participants for this training are individuals working with open source projects in low and middle income economies (LMIEs). The outcomes of this training will support an ecosystem-wide improvement in the scaffolding materials provided by projects to support community engagement, as well as a transferable upskilling of community engagement personnel; i.e., individuals that we train may go on to work on similar projects in the future and create additional scaffolding there. We see this skills development in community engagement as an essential component in investing in the health of OS communities, particularly those in LMIEs.
Proposed Activities: We are currently developing a multi-week course (“Creating Community Playbooks”, PBK) with an interactive workshop-style format to support learners in creating their own guides by referencing and reusing CSCCE’s templates and knowledge - and learning from peers who have created similar materials. The first iteration of this course is planned for early 2024. We propose hosting a private cohort of this course in mid-late 2024 specifically for OS contributor leads or equivalent roles from low and middle income economies (LMIEs). Six communities have expressed informal interest in participating in the course. In late 2023, we will follow up with them and recruit additional learners through our networks in the CSCCE Community of Practice (CoP) and in the broader OS space, and will also work with IOI to identify additional projects to include. The requested funds will support the onboarding of learners, delivery of the course and subsequent offboarding into the CSCCE CoP, where they can continue their learning journey through the development of a peer network and participation in additional CSCCE programming, including community calls, Slack discussions and other activities, as well as additional courses and workshops. Participation in the PBK course includes access to CSCCE’s training tools, including the Canvas OS learning management system (for accessing slides and notes). Upon graduation, learners will earn a digital badge (supported by OpenBadges technology) which they can display online. The course starts with an introduction to community playbooks and the different names they go by, how existing documentation can be modified into a new playbook, and access to the CSCCE playbook template. Learners will decide if they want to focus their playbooks on core team operations, contributor guidelines, or user documentation. Weeks 2-8 walk learners through different sections of a playbook, with opportunities for them to demonstrate work in progress and offer feedback to each other. We will invite guest presenters to share their playbooks and moderate discussions with the learners. At the end of the course, learners will have a “lite” version of their playbook/contributor guide as well as plans to socialize and maintain it in their communities. Implementing this proposal requires collaboration among multiple CSCCE staff members, including curriculum developers and trainers, a learner liaison who serves as a guide for students throughout the course, a technical TA to create the Canvas environment, and community manager to welcome the learners to the broader CSCCE CoP. Our budget covers the cost of 20 places in this course (a full cohort), at a rate of $1,000 / seat. This is a discount from our current (comparable) CEF course cost of $1,275. It also includes $5,000 in honoraria for guest speakers to share playbooks they have created with CSCCE with learners.
Openness: CSCCE works openly to share learnings and connect ideas across different contexts - and has expertise creating and participating in the spaces and activities that support knowledge sharing in this way. Our published resources on Zenodo - including collaboratively authored guidebooks and tip sheets - have been downloaded more than 42,000 times and our course and CoP are intentionally structured to support peer-to-peer sharing and collaboration. Our tip sheet (https://zenodo.org/record/4792731) on collaboration guides has been downloaded more than 640 times and we are working on a forthcoming guidebook that expands upon this documentation. After completing the course, we will publish a blog post summarizing the work and learning outcomes (https://www.cscce.org/2023/06/21/preparing-for-large-multi-stakeholder-collaborations-a-two-part-cscce-workshop/). Learners may also be invited to share their playbooks in a community call. The success of the course depends on the willingness of the learners to be open to sharing with each other and instructors to gain feedback on their documentation. Much of the course is ‘hands on’ time for learners to workshop each other’s materials and troubleshoot challenges. Prioritizing creating a safe and private course environment to enable this peer-to-peer sharing - with clear participation guidelines and expectation setting about what can be shared outside of the classroom in a non-harmful manner, will support us all in learning from this work.
Challenges: 1. Identifying 20 learners for the course. We have already received informal statements of interest from multiple OS projects with communities in LMIEs, including The Carpentries, RSE Asia, AfricaOSH, AfricArXiv, the Reagent Collaboration Network, and WildLabs. We can also recruit from connections outside of CSCCE and get support from IOI staff to identify other candidate projects. 2. The course requires regular synchronous interactions between learners and instructors who are located across multiple time zones, which presents challenges in terms of scheduling. As we recruit learners, we will prioritize scheduling class time to accommodate their schedules. 3. Reliable internet. To the best of our ability, we will make teaching environments and materials accessible to individuals who may have unreliable internet. We use Zoom, which is accessible via Mobile, so we can create breakout rooms during class. We use Canvas as our learning environment, which performs better under low bandwidth environments than comparable learning management platforms, such as Blackboard. The course materials are PDFs and Google docs / sheets, which can be accessed via Mobile. All classes will be recorded and shared privately on Canvas, so students can review them on their own as needed.
Neglectedness: The creation of this course has been partially subsidized by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of CSCCE’s financial sustainability plan. We would normally offer this course as part of our certification program (where learners pay to participate in a multi-course training) or as a standalone general registration course. Typically, funding for this kind of private course either comes from an overarching regional organization that pays for professional development of its members or staff (e.g., we worked with Australian BioCommons to host a private cohort of our Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) course (https://www.cscce.org/cef_abc/)), or from a philanthropic funder (e.g., CZI has previously funded private cohorts of the CEF course (https://www.cscce.org/cef23czi/)). We do not know of either an overarching regional organization or another philanthropic funding call that would support this private cohort of the Playbooks course.
Success: 1. Course completion and playbook creation Our target is for at least 90% of learners to complete the course and create a contributor guide. 2. Self-reported learning outcomes. We use surveys to identify how well the course met learners’ needs and delivered our learning and belonging goals, the results of which are shared with learners and funders. We aim for 90% of participants to report that they would recommend the course to others as well as for the majority of learners to report gaining new skills and increasing their confidence at addressing the challenges they shared during onboarding. 3. Ongoing engagement between learners / formation of new connections Many learners who complete a CSCCE course remain active in the CoP after the course is complete. A formal longitudinal evaluation is beyond the scope of this work (although one is currently being developed for our CEF course). However, a metric of success is continuing to see more than 30% of learners interacting with each other and other CoP members, resulting in new connections and collaborations. We see this catalytic effect regularly as a result of CSCCE activities. 4) Knowledge gained about OS projects in LMIEs We will measure success based on how much we are able to learn about the unique attributes and challenges facing OS projects in LMIEs and we aim to make this knowledge visible to the broader OS space. For example, we can work with learners to create openly available case studies of their projects.
Total Budget: $25,000
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement
LMIE Carveout: While CSCCE is based in the United States, we support an international virtual community of more than 600 members. We have already gathered informal statements of interest in participating in this course from the following OS projects with communities in LMIEs: The Carpentries, AfricArXiv, RSE Asia, the Reagent Collaboration Network, Wild Labs, and Africa OSH. In addition, if funded, we would work with IOI staff to identify additional candidate projects to participate in the training.
Team Skills: CSCCE staff have supported the creation of more than 50 playbooks for clients for a variety of contexts, including conference planning, scientific societies, and interdisciplinary research collaborations. They have led workshops for The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source Software for Science grantees, and count among their clients multiple open projects, including rOpenSci and the Michael J. Fox Foundation. In April-May 2023, they co-led the development and implementation of the POSE Training Program Pilot for the U.S. National Science Foundation Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems awardees. Emily Lescak (project and community manager) has more than three years of experience supporting open research communities at Code for Science and Society, The Wikimedia Foundation, and CSCCE. In August 2023, the team is launching a series of community calls focused on how community managers use open source tools to communicate and collaborate with their members. The proposed work will help us build upon our growing offerings of programming intended for OS project members.
Submission Number: 83
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