Project discussion: Dare UK and the community#
Chair: Fergus McDonald (DARE UK)
Prompts#
“Interest Groups (IGs) are open-ended in terms of their longevity. They focus on a broad-based challenge within the programme’s scope (e.g., software tooling to support information governance decision-making, reproducible research methodologies), and they should spawn WGs to address specific pieces of work.”
“Working Groups (WGs) are short-term (<18 months) in terms of their longevity. They focus on a specific, tractable piece of work – be that tools, policy, practices, products, proof of concepts, etc. – within the programme’s scope.”
“Communities are open-ended in terms of longevity. They are community-led, established, and managed. They are an open forum or ‘town square’ for the fostering of open communication across that specific community.”
Recent Birds of a Feather (BoF) discussion at Research Data Alliance (RDA) around essentially TREs
Notes#
General idea: template for groups to submit an e.g. 1 page proposal to DARE for:
an interest group (open-ended, no defined length, broad remit)
which creates multiple working groups (focussed on specific thing, target deadline)
Inspired by other groups having a similar model (Research Data Alliance)
DARE-UK decides if it makes sense, does it overlap with others
This would open guiding the direction of work to ‘the community’
Would require significant community buy in
How do we do that?
Do we think this is a good idea
DataShield community has grown faster than anticipated. There is pain from not establishing processes soon enough
How prescriptive can DARE be?
Came up with 6 “themes” to encourage community to “help itself”
Is it useful for the ‘programme’ to provide infrastructure like Teams, GitHub Org? Or is it better to leave that to individual groups?
Conflict between being overbearing and allowing participants to work. However, making effort to support and welcome contributions is important. DARE being a monolith in this case might be a step too far as it could make people wary to disagreeing with DARE or other DARE work.
Providing some infrastructure if an IG/WG wants it could help avoid arguments over Team vs Slack, GitHub vs GitLab etc.
DARE being in a position to enforce(?)/recommend a code of conduct and/or community guidelines would be beneficial
We have all bought into community knowledge sharing etc. We find making more tangible, significant efforts difficult. “We all already have full time jobs”.