UK TRE Community Governance and progress#

Leads: David Sarmiento (Turing), Hari Sood (Turing)

Proposal#

Summary#

The UK TRE Community received funding as part of the DARE UK Community grants call. This funding allowed for dedicated time from David (0.5 FTE) and Hari (0.5 FTE) between November and March to work on key community deliverables. The full funding application can be downloaded here - DARE UK Community Groups Funding Application - UK TRE

In this session, we want to dive deeper into the work we’ve been doing, and get feedback from the community. Specific things we’d like to cover include:

Required preparation#

None required, but reading over the links above (website and governance docs) would help the discussion.

Those that want to can also explore our public board that reflect the work done over this period

Target audience#

Anyone interested in how the community is run!

Session 1#

Summary#

Short discussion:

  • suggestion that an overview diagram showing the different organisations in the UK TRE network would be useful

  • some discussion on incentives for official endorsement, with exposure and buy-in from the growing community seen as potentially very valuable

Raw notes#

  • Would be great to see an overview diagram of the key organsations in the network

Working Groups#

  • Is endorsement worth it?

    • Yes, helpful to have it exposed to a lot of people and more officially endorsed gives somethnig a lot of backing

Steering Group#

  • Public/private voting

    • Are we going to get into anything contentious

    • Public allows us to see the impetus behind certain decisions

Roles/membership#

  • When you sign up for mailing list, agree to docs, get a copy when you get sent it

Session 2#

Summary#

The DARE UK grant for the Community Management group (concluding end March 2024) included development of a more user-friendly resource hub to replace the existing ReadTheDocs website, using Hugo for cost-effective, low-maintenance web development. This hub will feature sections for governance documents, resources, working groups (with a requirement for at least one open meeting), a comprehensive events calendar, and opportunities for community involvement. Additionally, the governance documentation of the community is now developed and open for review and input through an open project board on GitHub. Concerns have been raised about ensuring broader community engagement beyond GitHub for (final) community group output endorsement, highlighting the need for transparent objection handling and decision-making, as well as logging conflicts of interest during any community voting processes.

Next steps#

  • Generate 1-pager, with instructions on how to submit an event, instructions on how to submit a community resoruce etc. Could be useful to share with comms teams from different orgs (comms people don’t generally come to UK TRE meetings but will be better across events/resources that might be of interest)

  • Add submission link (Google form) to UK TRE website

Raw notes#

  • DARE UK grant ending end March 2024:

  • Aims:

      1. Resource hub/website, easier to use than current readthedocs website

      • Built with framework called Hugo. Markdown files that can be rendered in html.

        • Free (cf. squarespace)

        • not much technical debt/no javascript

      • Sections:

        • About: includes UK TRE community governance docs

        • Resources: includes code, community group outputs

          • organised by type, or by topic

        • Working groups: list of working groups, their charters, members. Need at least 1 open meeting

        • Events: Calendar with all community events, can subscribe to all/subset of these through this interface

        • Get involved: links for joining or getting involved in the community.

      1. Governance documentation of community developed, now to be tested/open to community review

  • KO: Once things are getting to an endorse stage, can’t just rely on GitHub/monthly meeting

    • Endorsement needs to have a very open, accessible way to engage (GitHub too geeky/inaccessible for many)

  • Objections

    • Making sure we make avaiable for reading what the objection is and decisions made

  • Voting

    • Logging conflict of interests in voting

Next steps#

  • Generate 1-pager, with instructions on how to submit an event, instructions on how to submit a community resoruce etc. Could be useful to share with comms teams from different orgs (comms people don’t generally come to UK TRE meetings but will be better across events/resources that might be of interest)

  • Add submission link (Google form) to website