---
title: "Community and Community Roles"
source: The Turing Way
source_url: https://github.com/the-turing-way/the-turing-way
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: data-and-analysis
subdomain: turing-way
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

(fw-community)=
# Community and Community Roles

_Everyone has a skill that is useful for someone, and therefore anyone can contribute to The Turing Way._

_The Turing Way_ book has been co-authored by more than 500 diverse contributors and utilised by different groups of individuals who are researchers, educators, learners, policymakers, government employees and industry professionals.

Our community members and general audience includes, but are not limited to, researchers, students, data scientists, software engineers, project leaders, team coordinators, community managers, data stewards, librarians, data science educators, open science practitioners and more.

As of January 2025, _The Turing Way_ community has been joined by more than 1000 members, who engage via GitHub, Slack Workspace and a range of community events.
The book itself has 6000+ monthly users worldwide (a total of 87,000 unique users in 2024 alone).

All contributions, discussions, and contributor details are handled through the central GitHub repository ([https://github.com/the-turing-way/the-turing-way/](https://github.com/the-turing-way/the-turing-way/)). 
Contributors' details are available in the [Contributors Records](#contributors-record), and the [project reports](https://github.com/the-turing-way/project-management/tree/main/quarterly_reports) offer detailed updates from different areas of work within _The Turing Way_.

(fw-community-book-roles)=
## Book-Related Roles

The book-related roles vary based on people’s involvement in reviewing, editing or developing new content in _The Turing Way_ chapters, subchapters, impact stories, personal stories, case studies and templates.
Reviewers are often drawn from the community, based on their experience in the chapter’s topic.
Often, reviewers are also invited from beyond the community to ensure new members have the chance to collaborate based on their expertise.

* **Co-authors**: Co-authors collaborate on writing, editing, revising, or adding/replacing relevant sections of a chapter in _The Turing Way_ book while following the {ref}`ch-style`.
* **Reviewer**: Reviewers critically review existing and new content of The Turing Way book, providing feedback, suggesting edits, and enhancing the accessibility, accuracy, and quality of the material.
* **Editors**: Editors oversee the overall coverage, coherence, and consistency of a chapter or a guide, or even the structure of _The Turing Way_ book at a meta-level and document the current status and areas for improvement in a GitHub issue. They may not be the same people who address those issues, but they can be involved in coordinating contributions from authors and reviewers from the community.
* **Mentors**: Mentors guide less experienced contributors, offering advice and support to help them clarify concepts, unpack their thoughts and ideas, and provide direction to ensure that new members can effectively participate in the development of _The Turing Way_ book.
* **Translators**: Contributors work the the Translation and Localisation team in translating any part of a chapter in the book as described in the {ref}`ch-translation`.
* **Ad-hoc advisors/consultants**: Individuals who are invited by our community members to ask for guidance and expertise in the context of their work in the book, community, or the overall project.

### Mentored-Contributions

Existing members of the community are connected with new contributors for support and mentoring, such as helping navigate _The Turing Way_ repository, workflow, writing process or even reviewing. 
Contributions also include providing advisory support, such as by sharing examples, resources or other relevant resources that could be helpful for the authors.

By enabling our community of users and contributors to engage with each other, we ensure that the project, community and resources can be used, shared and improved by diverse perspectives.
We describe the contribution process in the {ref}`ch-contributing`.

(fw-community-beyond-book)=
## Beyond the Book

The book may be the visible product of the work we do in the project, but, the process of collaborative development with the help of its community is what we value the most.
This project could not exist without the collaborative nature and willingness of our community members to support each other.
We are committed to providing an open, accessible and inclusive space for all our community members where they are appreciated, upskilled and given opportunities to contribute to the project in a way that is most meaningful for them.

Roles beyond the book can involve, but are not limited to the following:

* **Working Group Members (maintenance level members)** provide leadership, stewardship and support across different parts of the project and the community (described in [Governance chapter](#fw-governance)).
* **Steering Committee (constitution level members)** is constituted by chairs and/or representatives from across Working Groups and collaborative projects within _The Turing Way_ (described in {ref}`fw-governance`).
* **Advocates and champions** of _The Turing Way_ resources, who help others navigate the book, repositories and communications channel
* **Reviewers and Chapter Maintainers** of the book and underlying infrastructure
* **Co-creators** of content and infrastructure at any level from fixing bugs to adding new content beyond the book
* **Mentors and consultants** in specific areas of work, including responding to questions from other community members on GitHub and Slack
* **Sustained contributors** who provide expert consultation to improve the resources over a prolonged duration
* Members providing support through **in-kind collaboration/partnership**
* **Connector, convener and collaborators** from the broader data science network
* **_The Turing Way_ curious** (‘lurkers’) users of resources who read, adopt and share best practices from _The Turing Way_ in their work and participate in public events/communications channel
* Members sharing **personal experience** (which we value a lot!) to enrich _The Turing Way_ resources with real-world contexts
* **Speakers and presenters** of any aspect of _The Turing Way_ at different events and contexts.
* Legacy - Project Delivery Team: Between 2019 and 2025, the project was hosted by The Alan Turing Institute and received funding for several roles, including project leads, Community Manager, Project Manager and researchers, to support the community management and delivery of the project goals. These roles formed the project delivery team, previously responsible for constitution level governance.

New contributors to _The Turing Way_ can begin their journey at any time, and through various pathways including voluntary participation, invited contribution, training/workshop-based introduction, organisational collaboration, and personal collaboration with other community members or others.

Our general recommendations for new starters are the following:

* Start small! Find easy wins!
* Start with what you don’t know and want to learn.
* Start with what you know and want to share.
* Capture the process of how good projects are carried out in data science.
* Flag what is unclear about _The Turing Way_ or help build documents that you would like to have.
* Share your personal stories, case studies and perspective: _The Turing Way_ is a ‘lightly’ opinionated guide after all!

_To explore different pathways for community members to get involved, please visit the **Start Page: [https://the-turing-way.start.page/](https://the-turing-way.start.page/)_.

### Learn and Share Skills

Community members are provided with opportunities to learn new skills, share their ideas and collaborate with others. 
They are also given mentorship opportunities in the project as they make their contributions to _The Turing Way_ or other open source projects and are encouraged to mentor new participants of the project. 

Community members have been taking roles like trainers, workshop leads, translators, infrastructure maintenance, accessibility experts, representatives of different projects in _The Turing Way_ and advocates of different topics of _The Turing Way_'s interest in external projects.
Some of these areas of work have recently been formalised and are also being led by volunteer members (see Governance Roles).
For instance, _The Turing Way_ team and community members have been taking part in workshops from the very beginning.
Some of these workshops have become part of regular events and conferences to introduce _The Turing Way_ resources and data science practices to new audiences and early career researcher groups.

Delivery of these workshops includes the following roles:

* **Expert facilitators and trainers** of Open Science, Reproducibility and ethics-related workshops, both organised by _The Turing Way_ and delivered at external events
* **Technical trainer** for novice learners on tools like GitHub, Binder, Jupyter and Literate Programming 
* **Presenters and speakers** for international events/conferences who represent _The Turing Way_ on external platforms

All members are supported to structure their work in _The Turing Way_ to make them findable and onboard new members to provide continuity of their work.
Researchers are also supported to lead community-based discussions and collaborations that lead to projects and outputs beyond _The Turing Way_.

### Establish Partnership

_The Turing Way_ project also involves {ref}`collaborators<collaborators>` from projects within the Turing, partnering organisations, open-source communities, and beyond, either formally through funded grant proposals or informally through collaborative activities such as co-creation of resources (such as chapters, articles or community documentation) and events (such as Fireside Chat, Book Dash and external conference session).

### Represent _The Turing Way_

We have a chapter on {ref}`ch-presenting` to help you present and share about _The Turing Way_ in your network.

_The Turing Way_ team will be happy to discuss your ideas with you, provide feedback and any other assistance you need for delivering a talk.

_For further details on these community roles, please read the Community Handbook describing [different Contributions and their acknowledgements](#ch-acknowledgement-examples)._
