By DeEtta Jones

“To what extent are we willing to push people into, what I like to think of as productive discomfort, in this work? Are you we going to water things down so we can, at least, get people to the table? Are we just going to call it equity and put it off to the side? Or are we going to dig in and say no, decolonization, white supremacy, oppression? Where are we going to fall on that as a group? And if it means that some folks say hey, I'm out that's not for me, maybe we take that chance... some folks said when they first entered into this work they thought that the equity conversation was supposed to be a side conversation, it wasn't supposed to be a center conversation...but I think for me, I would not continue to be a part of this conversation if equity weren't a central part of the conversation.”  - April Hathcock, virtual group debrief, May 21, 2019

To read more about April’s reaction to the meeting read her blog post

Expectations of leaders have shifted, big time. Regardless of level, industry or discipline, leaders are expected to deal with issues for which they have little or no formal training, specifically white supremacy and anti-oppression. For  leaders in mission-driven organizations, ensuring “diversity” is included in formal statements and supporting minority recruitment and retention programs is often applauded - whether or not meaningful efforts really ever occurred. Diversity and inclusion  were once part of a larger portfolio of core operational responsibilities, which left diversity in a competitive position vis-a-vis the organization’s “strategic priorities”. Say goodbye to those days. Diversity is no longer a bonus. It’s officially moved, to quote bell hooks, “from margin to center”, and expanded to focus sharply on uprooting inequitable systems.  

Shifting expectations leave leaders feeling unprepared to navigate complex subject-matter and significant feelings of discomfort--others and their own. That’s why we’re sharing our story. Code for Science & Society has partnered with DeEtta Jones and Associates to facilitate our process of learning and growing that we believe would be helpful to capture and describe. We want other leaders to benefit from what we are discovering, and establish a sense of urgency about actions that can and should be taken to align with organizational values and changing cultural expectations.

Background

At the Open Source Alliance Open Science (OSAOS) Hackathon discussion in July 2018, a statement of values was brought to the group for discussion. The text reads:

Values statement

We want a system that is built for everyone. A system where all identities, bodies, and stories are valued, where your geography is not your destiny, and where your bank account doesn’t determine your access. Open scholarship is an invitation and an aspiration and we continue to work towards it until every voice is included. The existing structures and systems of scholarly production are built on capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, and misogyny. Our institutions use exclusion as an indicator of excellence and see labor as a commodity. Open scholarship, as defined in X, challenges these structures and provides an opportunity to embed anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and intersectional feminism in our scholarly communication system. When marginalized people are actively excluded, our scholarly record misses out on what could be a richer, fuller, more nuanced, and beautiful account of the world.

The discussion that grew out of this statement did not result in the adoption or rejection of the statement but organizers felt it important to learn from the process and from the difficult conversation that happened at the event. To that end, a survey was shared with participants and a facilitated conversation hosted to debrief, learn from, and share learnings from the conversation.

Following the meeting, Code for Science & Society President and Co-Executive Directors Danielle Robinson and Joe Hand, focused on supporting a project to formally reflect on, document and share the experience. The process included inviting all meeting participants to respond to written survey questions followed by a group call. The questions shared in the survey also served as a framework for the call that was recorded and transcribed to give facilitators rich data to pull from to inform these themes.  During the call 6 key themes from the call were identified by DeEtta Jones and Associates. They were:

1. Decentering whiteness and the redistribution of comfort
2. Using direct versus “watered down” language
3. A desire to be prepared for--and have skilled facilitation during--discussions.
4. Define terms such as “white supremacy” or “decolonization”
5. Defining the target audience
6. Creating learning opportunities or radical change

Though each of the themes is important and requires consideration, only three will be the focus of this blog post.

1.      Decentering whiteness and the redistribution of comfort.

This is the major emphasis of anti-oppression work, and it’s complicated. Decentering whiteness is not just about changing systems, like scholarship and education, but also the mental models by which every single one of us interprets and navigates the world. It is also the umbrella under which all of the other themes fall. The real questions associated with decentering whiteness are: To what extent are we 1) willing to acknowledge that whiteness has been and continues to be the center of EVERYTHING? 2) willing to shift our frame? and 3) courageous enough to actually DO DIFFICULT THINGS that are necessary in order for the shift to actually occur?

If you’re reading this blog you might be thinking, “I answer ‘yes’ to all those questions, but the question she didn’t ask is, ‘Am I qualified to talk about decentering whiteness?’” I know that’s the question, and I didn’t overlook it. I think that the preoccupation with “doing it perfectly” is making my point exactly. If you are too uncomfortable to try, knowing that it will be difficult and messy then, in fact, you’re actually answering ‘no’ to the previous questions. Perfectionism is a privilege. It rests on the backbone of “Truth”. “Truth” is centering whiteness; many truths that are not predicated on one “Truth” is decentering whiteness.  

As mentioned, redistribution of comfort is a through-thread in other call themes. For example, there was solid agreement among participants that more direct language, calling out white supremacy, was preferred and reflective of the group’s values. Though there was disagreement about this approach during and directly following the initial meeting, over time and upon reflection, several members of the group shifted their thinking. This shift is important because that’s how culture changes—through the expression of shared values. If direct language—that several members of the group initially found to be alienating—wasn’t introduced, the shift, and rich learning, that has now taken place would not have happened.  

Other ways that discomfort shows itself is through the expectation that everything be planned and communicated in advance, that meetings stay “on topic”, and expressing concerns that deeply diving into equity issues is “out of scope”. In 2019, equity, diversity and inclusion are going to come up, whether or not it’s on the agenda. Leaders can prepare for unexpected use of direct language and intense feelings by exploring one’s own perspectives, reflecting on skills for engaging others across differences, and taking a proactive approach to agenda design.

2.      Group Process Skills

The people participating in the meeting were and are incredibly competent communicators. They are fully capable of expressing thoughts clearly and in ways that respect a variety of views. However, when emotions are high and people’s most fundamental values are being debated, it is very difficult to facilitate the full engagement of others. In this meeting, there was not a “pure” facilitator, rather, someone was facilitating while being a full participant. Though that model is efficient and practical, it puts a tremendous burden, and frankly unrealistic expectation, on the person with the dual role. From a practical point of view, having an outside facilitator for all meetings is not feasible. At the beginning of a new group or project, it is worthwhile, especially for a project of this magnitude and reach, to engage an external process facilitator who is not a content contributor.

Having an outside facilitator isn’t always possible, nor practical. There are certain things that leaders can do to be prepared to rise to unexpected occasions.

1.     All groups work best with structure. Establish norms when the group is being formed, then revisit them at the beginning of every meeting. Include them in virtual work spaces, list them on meeting agendas.

2.     Clarify your role. Make sure that the group knows that you will be facilitating the process and contributing at a content level.

3.     When a complex topic is on the agenda, or one for which you know you will want to be a substantive contributor, ask someone else to facilitate that meeting or portion of the discussion. You can also ask for a co-facilitator if that is a more practical solution.

4.     As facilitator, you are responsible for managing group process. That means that you will need to design clear agendas, track time, move discussions from one agenda item to the next, and use structured tools for ensuring all members contribute. Those are the science. The artful elements of facilitation are related to listening and interpreting nuances, including silence. You will need to encourage the group to avoid quickly moving to decision, solicit dissenting or minority points of view, create space for “going deeper” on issues that may not directly reflect the agenda but that are important for gaining fuller meaning, perspective and ownership among group members, and share your ideas last.

3.      Create Shared Working Definitions

Typical of many collaborations, a number of the members in this group were not born in and/or do not live in the United States. Every national culture has a unique history; unique ways of interpreting words and making meaning. The words white supremacy, for example, have different meaning to people who are from Germany and may make an immediate affiliation with Nazi-ism and the Holocaust. In the United States the ways in which anti-oppression are addressed are unique to its national culture. Certainly, there is the existence of white supremacy and colonization in many parts of the world, but the way the language is used and what is means will take on cultural nuances, from one national culture to the next.

Further, even within one cultural context—the United States for example—white supremacy and decolonization are not universally used or understood. Why should they be? As a national culture, they haven’t been discussed in fulsome and broadly accessible ways. There is no discussion in public education about white supremacy. There’s no mention of the impacts of colonization on higher education as part of a first-year college experience. In workplaces, people have been actively discouraged for 40 plus years from talking about anything that could make another person feel uncomfortable. There is little to no formal and expected preparation for dealing with issues of white supremacy and decolonization beyond individuals’ personal commitment. Explicitly developing and using shared working definitions of words and phrases is a step that should not be glossed over. Making the space to define important terms under discussion can help to surface assumptions and support the inclusion of more voices in the process

4.      Learning or Radical Change?

About two-thirds into the call the group’s focus went to the shifts in thinking that were catalyzed by the values statement’s direct language followed by thoughtful reflection and structured debrief. They were beginning to make a case for how this experience can help inform criteria for identifying new collaborators. This is the point at which, in my opinion, the core question was called. “Is the purpose of this group to promote individuals’ learning or radical change?” Drop the mic.

Decentering whiteness, creating shared working definitions, using solid group process skills for engagement are important—they are the “how” of your work. The “why” question for nonprofit leaders in 2019 is about purpose. What is the purpose of your organization and/or project vis-à-vis your values? How do you authentically and courageously live out those values as you approach strategy, partnerships, decision-making and language? As you explore options, use criteria and strategic questions to guide you.

1.     To what extent is your organization’s success tied to radical change? To learning and engagement?

2.     What needs to be present for radical change to occur? What needs to be absent or removed? What needs to be present for learning to occur? What needs to be absent or removed?

3.     To what extent do your key constituents—those upon whom you depend—understand and agree with your answers to Q1 and Q2?

4.     Do you have the skills necessary to push a radical change agenda? Do you have the skills necessary to promote learning and engagement?

5.     To what extent do you anticipate identifying new and desirable collaborators by pursuing a radical change agenda? To what extent do you anticipate identifying new and desirable collaborators by pursuing a learning and engagement agenda?

6.     Are you willing to lose some of your current affiliates in pursuing a radical change agenda? Are you willing to lose some of your current affiliates in pursuing a learning and engagement agenda?

7.     Do the two have—radical change or learning and engagement—have to be mutually exclusive? What potential benefits could come from pursuing both? Consequences?

Key Take-aways for Nonprofit Leaders

The areas of focus emphasized in this blog post represent what is happening in most organizations—the perfect storm of experiences where EDI and organizational effectiveness intersect. I can’t think of any organizations that are truly wrestling with EDI issues without bumping into, over and over again, the ways in which organizational practices are either causing or supporting some of the very issues to be overcome. While there is certainly a need to continue to learn about anti-oppression issues and ways of overcoming oppressive systems, there also exists an expectation that leaders are emotionally intelligent, culturally competent, and skilled group process facilitators.

DeEtta Jones is an invited speaker, equity, diversity and inclusion strategy consultant and author with more than twenty years of experience working with people from around the world to on personal effectiveness and building workforce capacity. Learn more about DeEtta Jones & Associates at their website, www.deettajones.com

Fiscal sponsor organizations are US-based nonprofit organizations that work with projects administer grant funding. Fiscal sponsorship is an arrangement specific projects working with US-based funders. The role of the sponsor is to accept and administer funds, in compliance with US tax law. Fiscal sponsors can also provide a larger umbrella that includes financial and administrative infrastructure to support grant and donation-funded projects.

You may have not have heard of fiscal sponsorship, but you are probably familiar with projects in the open source for science and scholarship space who work with fiscal sponsors. For example, ROpenSci, Project Juypter, and MatPlotLib work with NUMfocus. Dat and PREreview work with Code for Science & Society. The Carpentries work with Community Initiatives. Operating in the US and internationally, OpenCollective operates as a both a fiscal sponsor and donation platform. This platform is gaining momentum as a place to crowd-fund, showcase larger corporate donations, and operate with financial transparency.

In this post I will describe what fiscal sponsorship is and how it supports projects in our space.

Why would a project work with a fiscal sponsor?

As a project matures, it may apply for grant funding or solicit donations as a part of its startup phase or sustainability plan. In order to accept manage these funds in compliance with funder guidelines and tax law, a project needs a nonprofit designation. However, getting a nonprofit designation in the US is not a quick process. Creating and managing a nonprofit entity to house an open source project can be a time-consuming distraction. Fiscal sponsors provide fiscal oversight and administration, often with other back-office benefits, without committing the project to administering a nonprofit structure.

What models of fiscal sponsorship exist?

Nonprofits run fiscal sponsorship programs as a part of their broader mission. There are multiple models of fiscal sponsorship, but Model A and C are the most common in our space.

"Model A" or "comprehensive" fiscal sponsorship is a model wherein the project becomes a part of the sponsoring entity. People who work on the project become employees (or volunteers) at the sponsoring entity. For example, OpenReview (a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society) has full time employees and contractors employed by CS&S to work on OpenReview. This arrangement shifts the burden of financial administration - and in some cases HR, payroll, benefits, and other administrative activities - completely to the sponsoring entity. This reduces the time and effort spent on financial and administrative issues and may give the sponsoring entity more oversight into the day to day activities of the project.

"Model C" or the "re-grant model" of fiscal sponsorship describes an arrangement where a grant-making entity (or a donation) approves funding for a project, the sponsor holds the funds and re-grants them for the purposes of the project. The project engages volunteers, contractors, or employees and caries out their own bookkeeping and administration. In other words, the project does not become a part of the fiscal sponsor.

In both models, it's critical that the project's mission is aligned with the mission and charitable activities of the fiscal sponsor.

These are the two most common arrangements. As you may have guessed, there are many models of fiscal sponsorship. Colvin's book Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 ways to do it right is a detailed introduction to the topic.

Considerations

Requirements

To ensure oversight or a project and alignment with a sponsor's mission, there may be an application process, governance requirements, or other benchmarks a project needs to meet. Requirements differ across fiscal sponsorship organizations. At Code for Science & Society, every fiscally sponsored project needs to be approved by our board, be in line with our mission, and have an advisory committee to whom the project leader is accountable. Among other requirements, NumFOCUS requires a Code of Conduct, a group of 3-5 people to sign the fiscal sponsorship agreement, and a focus on scientific computing.

Cost

Financial administration costs money, as does providing other benefits and services under a stable nonprofit umbrella. Fiscal sponsors typically charge a percentage of total project revenue, ranging from 8% to 15% (and sometimes more for certain types of grants). These fees may be charged on top of the grant amount or subtracted from a donation - this practice varies between funders.

Intellectual Property

Particularly in Model A fiscal sponsorship arrangements, the sponsor will hold the project's copyright and intellectual property (IP). From the perspective of the project, this can be disconcerting. The goal of this is to insure that the sponsor has the right to defend copyright and IP issues, should they arise.

Flexibility

As you grow (thanks to the support of your fiscal sponsor!) you may want to start your own nonprofit or incorporate in another way. As you consider fiscal sponsorship, it's important to ask how about the process for exiting a fiscal sponsorship agreement.

Resources

What is Fiscal Sponsorship?

Fiscal Sponsorship: A Hidden Resource for Nonprofit Entrepreneurs

Fiscal Sponsorship: A Balanced Overview

Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 Ways to Do it Right

Fiscal Sponsorship for Nonprofits

NumFOCUS on their Fiscal Sponsorship Program

Community Initiatives on Fiscal Sponsorship and their services

Would you like to download the contents of this blog? Or search it like you'd search a book or pdf?

Check out https://osaos-book.codeforscience.org/ for a more book-like view of the blog. It will rebuild automatically when the blog is updated. It should also print okay(ish).

Still a bit of work to do on ordering (right now its alphabetical by tag) and styles.

Built via https://github.com/codeforscience/osaos-ghost-book if anyone is interested or wants to help make it look better!

The Open Source Alliance for Open Scholarship Handbook was discussed, created, edited, reviewed, and contributed-to, and otherwise extended by the following people. This project is open to contribution and licensed CC-0.

Nokome Bentley is a New Zealand-based fisheries scientist and founder of Trophia, a research and advisory service for marine resource management. He serves as the project lead for Stencila, an open source platform for creating, collaborating on, and sharing data-driven content.

Georgia Bullen is Executive Director of Simply Secure and previously led work on Measurement Lab (MLab). She has been an advocate in the internet health movement through her work and passion around issues such as net neutrality, security, privacy, and equitable access to technology. She has a background in human-centered design, data visualization, urban planning and software development, and is an advocate for diversity in technology.

Stefanie Butland is the Community Manager for rOpenSci and a 2017 AAAS Community Engagement Fellow.  She is a biologist, bioinformatician, and compulsive people-connector  and knowledge-sharer. Stefanie has done research in bacteria, plants,  insects and mammals, first at the bench and then on a laptop. At  rOpenSci she is building up the social infrastructure for open and  reproducible research with shared data and reusable software. ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5427-8951

Jonathan Cain, MLIS is the Head of Data Services at the University of Oregon Libraries. He holds an MSLIS from Pratt Institute and holds an MA in Africana Studies from New York University and a BS in Anthropology from College of Charleston. At the University of Oregon, Jonathan works directly with researchers implementing research data management best practices, open research practices, and adopting open source tools for data management, analysis, and sharing. He also the libraries’ liaison to the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management, providing in-depth consultative reference services, collection development, and course-integrated instruction. Jonathan is building the Oregon Nonprofit Index as a member of the Mozilla Open Leaders Program (5th Cohort) and has served as the chair for the State Library of Oregon’s Library Services & Technology Act (LSTA) Program Advisory Committee. He also serves on the board of Oregon Black Pioneers, a nonprofit organization focusing on researching and providing education about the contributions of African Americans to Oregon history.

Asura Enkhbayar is a PhD candidate and data scientist at the ScholCommLab at Simon Fraser University. He is interested in critically exploring scholarly communication within a framework informed by contemporary philosophy of technology and mind. Following an undergraduate degree in electronics, Enkhbayar studied cognitive science. Although his personal research interests are increasingly moving away from the hard sciences and toward the humanities and social sciences, he remains an avid coder. He also contributes to contributes to Open Knowledge Maps and, most importantly, Asura played the main role of Yu in the martial arts short-film The Dojo Part II (watch the trailer on Vimeo). You can find more information about the progress of his PhD on this GitHub repository, and find him on Twitter at @Bubblu_.

Monica Granados, PhD is a Mitacs Canadian Science Policy Fellow working as Policy Analyst at Environment and Climate Change Canada in open science. In her research she is interested in taking all we know about food webs and using this information to monitor changes in freshwater systems and provide tangible recommendations to decision makers and the public. As a staunch advocate of open science, she works in the open making all the code and publications from her research openly available.

Joe Hand is Co-Executive Director at Code for Science & Society and a core developer on Dat Project. He has experience developing and managing data-focused programs for researchers and community-driven organizations. Previously, Joe managed a global project at the Santa Fe Institute to transform data collection practices of an international NGO, operating in slums across 30 countries in the Global South.

April Hathcock, JD, MLIS is the Librarian for Scholarly Communications at New York University. She educates the university community about issues relating to ownership, rights, and access in the research lifecycle. She received her J.D. and LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Duke University School of Law and her MLIS from the University of South Florida. Before entering librarianship, she practiced intellectual property and antitrust law for a global private firm.

Samantha Hindle, PhD is Co-Founder of PREreview and Content Lead at bioRxiv. Sam is a Neuroscientist with an active interest in science communication, publishing and education.

Chris Holdgraf is a Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and a Community Architect at the Data Science Education Program at UC Berkeley. His background is in cognitive and computational neuroscience, where he used predictive models to understand the auditory system in the human brain. He's interested in the boundary between technology, open-source software, and scientific workflows, as well as creating new pathways for this kind of work in science and the academy. He's a core member of Project Jupyter, specifically working with JupyterHub and Binder, two open-source projects that make it easier for researchers and educators to do their work in the cloud. He works on these core tools, along with research and educational projects that use these tools at Berkeley and in the broader open science community.

Daisie Huang, PhD is a developer at Dryad Digital Repository and a Research Associate at Beaty Biodiversity Centre, UBC. Her mission is to develop software that increases the productivity of scientists and academics.

Ivo Jimenez is a PhD candidate at the UC Santa Cruz Computer Science Department and a member of the Systems Research Lab. He is interested in large-scale distributed data management systems. His thesis focuses on the practical aspects in the reproducible evaluation of systems research, work for which he was awarded the 2018 Better Scientific Software Fellowship. Ivo is originally from Mexico, where he got his B.S. in Computer Science from Universidad de Sonora. From 2006 to 2010 he worked as a research associate in the Database Research Lab at HP Labs.

Daniel S. Katz, PhD is a computer, data, and information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working on the development and use of advanced cyberinfrastructure to solve challenging problems at multiple scales, and policy issues such as citation and credit mechanisms and practices associated with software and data, organization and community practices for collaboration, and career paths for computing researchers.

Joey Lee, MSc is an interaction designer and technologist with a strong focus on experience design, strategy, quantitative and qualitative research, and web design/development. He has a M.Sc in Geography and was a 2015 Mozilla Fellow for Science. He teaches at School of Visual Arts in the Design for Social Innovation program and New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

Giuliano Maciocci is Head of Product and User Experience at eLife. As Head of Product and UX at eLife, one of the world's most innovative players in Open Access publishing, Giuliano leads a combined Product, UX and Innovation team tasked with creating new technology platforms and user experiences for the delivery and discovery of peer-reviewed scientific research. Before joining the Open Science movement, Giuliano’s work and patent portfolio in the technology sector encompassed projects in mobile and web design, smart TV interfaces, Mixed Reality, gestural interfaces, and wearable technologies.

Laura Maher is a Program Manager at the Siegel Family Endowment where she supports people and organizations working at the intersection of technology, education, and future workforce.

Aurelia Moser is a curious web-cartographer and coder in San Francisco, CA, USA. She made magic at the Mozilla Science Lab on open source projects and open web/science fellowships.

Brendan O’Brien is a leader in the open source software development community and open data movement. He founded Qri (pronounced “query”) to help bring the benefits of open source software to public data. He helped to launch DataTogether.org, a network of communities, data scientists, and developers dedicated to promoting a culture of data collection and sharing. He is also a member of EDGI, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, founded to support efforts to preserve at-risk government environmental data.

Naomi Penfold, PhD has a background in neuroscience research and now works to encourage the adoption of preprints in the life sciences through community building and support as Associate Director of ASAPbio. Previously, she was Innovation Officer at eLife where she worked to identify and support people and projects improving open research communication, from discovery and sharing to consumption and evaluation. She is interested in open source technology and using the web for open science communication and collaboration.

Danielle Robinson, PhD is a proven community leader and strategic advisor to researchers, librarians, and tech communities innovating in research and open source. In 2016, she completed a PhD in Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University, during which time was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and advocated for policies that supported open access on campus. As a 2016 Mozilla Fellow for Science, she ran open source project management workshops around the world, explored decentralized approaches to data preservation. She now focuses on developing infrastructure to expand and protect open access knowledge as Co-Executive Director of Code for Science & Society.

Kristen Ratan is the Co-Founder of the Collaborative Open Knowledge Foundation. She has a 20-year history of leading strategic innovations in the information industry.

Daniela Saderi is a neuroscience PhD Candidate and community organizer passionate about bringing open practices into the world of academia as a means to improve reproducibility and collaboration. She is also a Mozilla Fellow 2018-2019 and the co-founder of PREreview, a community and a platform for the crowd-sourcing of preprint peer reviews in scientific research.

Vicky Steeves, MLIS is the Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility, a dual appointment between NYU's Division of Libraries and Center for Data Science. She supports students, faculty, staff, and researchers in creating well-managed, high quality, and reproducible research through facilitating use of tools such as ReproZip.

Carly Strasser, PhD has worked in academia, philanthropy, and open source scholarly publishing. She currently serves as the Director of Academic Alliances and Data Strategy at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Shea Swauger, MLIS is the Head of Researcher Support Services at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver. Shea's role is to connect people with the resources, spaces, services, and technology that will help them with their research. Shea is passionate about the intersection of technology, data, and ethics and their impact how people interact with information and with each other. He is the Director of the Data to Policy Project (D2P), an initiative to engage students with community needs through course-based assignments, which culminate into data-driven policy proposals to local governments and agencies.

Dawn Walker is a PhD Student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information Digital Curation Institute. Her research focuses on citizen participation in technology design practices, in particular for environmental advocacy. Sitting at the intersection of the technology design, information practices, and civic engagement, Dawn's research bridges socio-technical design approaches with critical social science inquiry. She is a member of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) Archiving work group, developing approaches to preserve and track changes to federal environmental data.

Stephanie Wright, MLIS is the Senior Program Manager for the Open Leadership & Events team of the Mozilla Foundation. Her team at Mozilla focuses on hosting events such as Working Open Workshops, the annual Global Sprint and Mozfest events, Open Leadership Trainings, developing educational resources such as the Open Data Training Program, and building a community of leaders through Mozilla Fellowships, Science Mini Grants, and other activities. Prior to Mozilla, Stephanie worked for the University of Washington where she developed and led the Libraries Research Data Services Unit, served as a Senior Data Science Fellow at the UW’s eSciences Institute, and co-authored the Librarian Outreach Kit as part of the Community Engagement & Outreach Working Group for DataONE.

Authorship on the blog

Where many people worked on a piece it will be attributed to OSAOS.

Attribution & Reuse

This work is published CC-0 to allow free reuse, remixing, and sharing.

Acknowledgements

We thank writer and editor Katie Gustafson her work.

A Codes of Conduct (CoC) is a necessary part of any inclusive, professional gathering.  Here, we share the CoC we developed for this event and links to the resources that helped us develop it.

Code of Conduct

This Code of Conduct outlines our expectations for all attendees, including organizers, of any Open Source Alliance for Open Scholarship (OSAOS) event, both online and in-person regarding activities in relation to events. This code also details steps for reporting unacceptable behavior. Organizers will enforce this code throughout any OSAOS events. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.

We want to create a safe, professional space for people to learn from each other, and maintaining a high standard of professional behavior at events is critical to that goal. The organizers are committed to providing a harassment-free environment for everyone regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or work experience. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any professional event. Event participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event without any pecuniary reimbursement at the discretion of the conference organizers.

Harassment includes, but is not limited to:

• Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion or work experience.
• Sexual images in public spaces
• Deliberate intimidation, stalking or following
• Harassing photography or recording
• Sustained disruption of talks or other events
• Uninvited physical contact
• Unwelcome sexual attention
• Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior

Anything that makes someone feel uncomfortable could be deemed harassment. For more information about what constitutes harassment and examples, please refer to OpenCon’s Code of Conduct in Brief and the Gathering for Open Source Hardware’s examples of behavior.

Enforcement

Participants (including organizers) asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, event organizers retain the right to take any actions to keep the event a welcoming environment for all participants. This includes warning the offender or expulsion from the event without pecuniary reimbursement.

Event organizers may take action to redress anything designed to disrupt, or with the clear impact of disrupting, the event or making the environment hostile for any participants.

We expect participants to follow these rules at all event venues (including online) and OSAOS-related social activities (including happy hour, dinners, and other peripheral events).

Reporting

If someone makes you or anyone else feel unsafe or unwelcome, please report it as soon as possible. Harassment and other Code of Conduct violations reduce the value of our event for everyone. We want you to be happy at our event. People like you make our event a better place.

You can make a report either personally or anonymously. All reports will be handled with discretion.

Anonymous report

You can make an anonymous report here.

We can't follow up an anonymous report with you directly, but we will fully investigate it and take whatever action is necessary to prevent a recurrence.

Personal report

You can make a personal report directly in person or by email to community@codeforscience.org

Danielle Robinson and Joe Hand will both receive emails sent to this address.

The following people are the Event Safety Team. They will take the lead in receiving and acting on reports during the events:

• Daniela Saderi, PREreview, cell: number redacted for blog post
• Joe Hand, Code for Science & Society, cell: number redacted for blog post

Before the event, reports are being monitored by Danielle Robinson and Joe Hand, Co-Executive Directors of Code for Science & Society. Daniela Saderi and Kristen Ratan comprise the rest of the committee and will assist with enforcement of the code of conduct during the event.

When taking a personal report, organizers will ensure you are safe and cannot be overheard. They may involve other event staff to ensure your report is managed properly. Once safe, we'll ask you to tell us about what happened. This can be upsetting, but we'll handle it respectfully, and you can bring someone to support you. You won't be asked to confront anyone, you will not be left alone, and all reports will be handled with discretion.

In your report, please do your best to include:

• Your contact information
• Identifying information (e.g. names, nicknames, pseudonyms) of the participant who has violated the Code of Conduct
• The behavior that was in violation
• The approximate time of the behavior (if different than the time the report was made)
• If possible, where the Code of Conduct violation happened
• The circumstances surrounding the incident
• Other people involved in the incident
• If you believe the incident is ongoing, please let us know.
• If there is a publicly available record (e.g. mailing list record, chat record), please include an image or link
• Any additional helpful information

After you file a report, a representative will contact you personally to review the incident, follow up with any additional questions and make a decision as to how to respond. If the person who is harassing you is part of the response team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse.

Local services

Our team will be happy to help you contact hotel/venue security, local law enforcement or local support services, to provide escorts, or otherwise assist you to feel safe for the duration of the event. We value your attendance.

Useful contact information:

• In the event of an emergency, dial 911 for police, fire or ambulance services. Where possible, please consult with venue staff or event organizers first.
• NYU Campus Public Safety can be reached 24/7 at 212-998-2222

Questions

For questions about codes of conduct, we recommend you check this Code of Conduct FAQ.

Acknowledgements

This Code of Conduct is based on the eLife 2018 Sprint Code of Conduct, which in turn is based on the example anti-harassment policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Ada Initiative and other volunteers (CC0) and the OpenCon 2017 Code of Conduct (CC-BY OpenCon organizers, SPARC and Right to Research Coalition).

By Samantha Hindle, Monica Granados, and Daniela Saderi

From individuals to a team

The PREreview team share their personal journeys from individual academic careers to co-leading an open scholarship project. What were we doing before PREreview? How did we decide to join forces?

Monica: I thought I had to perpetuate that model that has stood for over a hundred years. Research, write a manuscript, submit said manuscript and after rounds of peer review have the results read by a small audience of other academics.

Amidst 100% humidity in a city hundreds of miles from the species I studied, I learned of a parallel academic world where data, methodology, and results were available openly. Where science was not constrained by archaic publishing models. After participating in the NCEAS/RENCI Open Science for Synthesis workshop I became a staunch advocate of open science. I began conceiving and developing workshops for other scientists and academics to learn to work in the open.

Working at the intersection of open and my academic pursuits, I sought to work beyond making my research open and instead make open data more accessible. Through the Mozilla Open Leaders Program I developed a mobile application for the Guide to Eating Ontario Fishes from idea to minimum viable product. The program connected me with other open leaders and lead me to mentor the PREreview project in the subsequent cohort. My open journey began with someone from the open community exposing me to new ways of thinking, and in turn I now inspire others to work in the open with the support of other individuals, groups and organizations advocating for open.  

Sam: When I look back on how I got into the open science community, it strengthens the notion that you never know where an opportunity will lead.  My advice is to always keep your eyes, and mind, open.

My connection to this community emanated from meeting various Mozilla Fellows at an OpenCon satellite event who welcomed me to participate in a Mozilla mini-Working Open Workshop. This opened my eyes to the idea and potential of working openly. Going into this event, I had a misconceived notion that Github was only for hardcore coders. On top of this, the thought of generating and launching a project openly - in the public eye - from the very first word of our very first resource document, was frightening. What if someone reads it before it’s ready? What if there are errors? What if they think it is terrible? I quickly learned that IT IS OK and that working in the open is an uplifting, positive and supportive experience. I remember leaving the workshop being so energised that I spent my 5-hour wait at Portland airport working on our Github repo and trying out new markdown code; it was exciting and quite addictive! From that point on, I was swept up by a wave of open science programs, events, and inspirational people, and I’ve never looked back.

Daniela: As my Ph.D. career progressed, I saw and experienced the limitations of my training and the culture within academia. I learned a lot about experimental design and innovative techniques, but I often felt disconnected from the positive impact science can have on society. As I researched for new opportunities to engage with the scientific community, I came across the open science movement.

Thanks to Robin Champieux, Scholarly Communication Librarian at OHSU (amazing woman I today consider my “open mentor”), I had the privilege to attend OpenCon 2016 and meet some incredible people from all over the world, true catalysts for change. I arrived not knowing what open science really meant.  I left that conference inspired and with ideas about how even I, as a PhD student, could play a part in fostering change towards more open, inclusive and collaborative ways of doing science. I continued to engage with the open community, and helped organize local events aimed at raising awareness around issues of open science through hands-on learning and conversations with leaders in the field.

Thanks to Dr. Danielle Robinson, at the time Mozilla Fellow, I discovered the Mozilla Science Lab and their efforts in helping re-shape the landscape of academic research by empowering individuals to become open leaders in their fields. Through work with the Mozilla community, I met the two incredible women with whom I today work on the PREreview project, Sam and Monica. Mozilla has believed in us and our ideas since day one, and continues to support us today through my Fellowship. I look forward to learning from members of these communities, challenging my assumptions and seeking the perspectives of diverse individuals and groups to build scholarship that is open and inclusive by default.

PREreview’s Team Story

How did we become a team?

It’s more like our team found us. We were brought together and found that, as early-career researchers, we shared the same passions and concerns. While we don’t have a “dream team” formula that can apply to everyone, we are realizing what works best for us and learning along the way.

Since the beginning, we made the conscious decision to distribute leadership across the three of us because we believe that shared leadership is a more productive managerial approach for us to grow a successful project. We all bring different skills, experiences and personalities to the table and, as we grew as a team, we came to appreciate how those differences could be leveraged to strengthen the core of our team. We realized the importance of understanding each other’s personalities, learning how to recognize cues and behaviors in response to different situations, and finding channels of communication that work for all of us.

One challenge we face as a co-leadership team is that we are dispersed across three different areas of the world. Particularly as PREreview began as a “side project” to our three full time jobs, coordinating our spare time to juggle tasks and responsibilities across two time zones was tricky as we were not all available to work on tasks at the same time. In order for the project to move forward, we needed to trust each other to make decisions when others were absent, and to report back to keep everyone informed. Now that, thanks to Mozilla, one of us is working full time on the project, we are well-positioned to use the experience and trust we have nurtured over the past year of working together to accelerate PREreview’s mission.

Our recipe for a successful co-leadership boils down to technology, a shared clarity of our mission, and building friendship and trust within our team. For example, we rely on an organizational tool called Asana to organize our thoughts and assign tasks. This allows us to free ourselves from the instant feedback loop, where urgency and immediate responses are necessary for all tasks. Instead it facilitates a workflow where tasks are created, assigned, and completed asynchronously. Finding a rhythm of communication that worked for our team had a significant positive impact on our efficiency, management of work-life balance, and self care. Lastly, but most importantly, we made a specific effort to build empathy and trust. We do that by setting aside time to meet in person or on a call to discuss important issues, as well as setting an expectation for honest and open conversations.

PREreview is still a young initiative at just over a year old. We were therefore thrilled to announce at the end of 2018 that we were awarded over 100k dollars in funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to build a new platform and launch a partnership with Outbreak Science.  We are grateful for all the help and support we are receiving from our new fiscal sponsor, Code for Science and Society. Together we are ready to take on new challenges in 2019, such as navigating the complexities of managing these awards and supporting our community as PREreview continues to mature. Stay tuned on prereview.org and on twitter @PREreview_.

By Stefanie Butland

Stefanie is the Community Manager for rOpenSci. She is a biologist, bioinformatician, and compulsive people-connector and knowledge-sharer. Stefanie completed her MSc in Biology at York University in Toronto, doing fruit fly behavior genetics. In this piece, Stefanie talks about the value of training community leaders and her experience with the American Association for the Advancement of Science Community Engagement Fellows Program. Photo of the rOpenSci community at the rOpenSci Unconference in 2017 by Karthik Ram.

In my career I’ve gone from working as a research scientist who could never resist connecting people who have complementary skills and needs, to a community leader in an open source project. In 2017, I started my dream job as the first-ever Community Manager for The rOpenSci Project. rOpenSci builds open tools for open and reproducible research along with the social infrastructure needed to support and promote this mission. I’ve been a compulsive community builder since the early 2000’s, but until recently it was rarely part of my job description. The American Association for the Advancement of Science Community Engagement Fellows Program (AAAS-CEFP) came at the ideal time for me to learn among a cohort of 17 peers how to develop and implement a strategy that would maximize impact for effort in engaging with the rOpenSci community.

The one-year training program involved three face-to-face workshops throughout the year, monthly webinars, and a group project to dig deeper into a subject of interest. This program provided me with a framework and the theory behind the things that I had previously done based on a “gut feeling” and exposed me to approaches to community engagement that I could use to build on existing activities in rOpenSci. Beyond the training itself, it created a trust network of professionals that continue to communicate with and seek advice from each other. The cohort has published guidelines and how-to’s in the form of a Fellows blog series on topics like fostering diversity, how to make newcomers to your community feel like they can contribute, building community advocacy and ambassador programs, and many others.

The practice of community engagement plays such a key role in building a sustainable project in open scholarship, I think many projects should consider including a funded community manager role in their organization. I strongly recommend that people in these roles apply to participate in the AAAS-CEFP training program as it is currently the only one of its kind dedicated to people managing scientific communities.

In writing the pieces included in People we surfaced resources that have helped us along the way. We've also included a list of questions that have been helpful to ask ourselves and our teams for the development of our work.

Resources for Individuals

• Mozilla open leaders program is a 14-week program that takes individuals or teams through the process of building an open project. All of their resources are freely available under a CC BY 4.0 license. Link here: https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/mozilla-open-leaders/
• The Rockwood Leadership Institute has compiled a list of 21 self care resources you can read about to maintain a good work balance. Link: https://rockwoodleadership.org/21-self-care-resources-help-heal-survive/
• Selfcare.tech is a a repository of self-care resources for developers & others. You can find a list of resources and tools to practice self care. Link: http://selfcare.tech/
• The absence of self care can lead to the deterioration of your health and project. Learn more about what you can do to operationalize self care in work day. Link: https://hbr.org/2017/06/6-ways-to-weave-self-care-into-your-workday

A book on feminist leadership, Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership speaks to any individual or organization that wants to be more inclusive, transparent, and imbed an ethic of care into the workplace. Link: http://libraryjuicepress.com/feminist-leadership.php

Resources for teams

• Inclusive hiring tips from Project Include
• Lead with clarity
• Diversity on Nonprofit boards
• Pyramid of Clarity to develop your mission
• DataActive/BigBang - a tool for evaluating open source communities
• Folks Who Code
• Guide to co-leadership: Blog post that outlines “why having co-leaders is hard, why it’s a source of enhanced productivity, creativity, and joy when it works, and some tactics for success”. Personal take on the post: The post is written from a “business perspective” and it opens by saying that “everything is on you as leader”, and the success of the company will be determined by your vision, your creativity, your smarts, etc.
• Co-Leading a Team on an Open Project in this series.
• Organization tools (e.g., Asana, Slack, Gitter, GitHub, Trello)
• Open Science Framework (OSF) - a collaboration tool for scientific teams

Questions to ask yourself and your team

• How do you define your project? What is your projects unique impact?
• How do you build your leadership skills?
• How can you prevent burn-out?
• Are you affecting change through your project? The change doesn’t have to be enormous; small changes can move mountains.
• What’s your strategy for communicating even those small contributions? How do you share them?
• How do we build a diverse team?
• What is appropriate size for a team? How do you determine what is right for the project?
• How to give team members a purpose/role that they can be passionate about?
• What’s the right size for a team?
• When to assign a Board of Directors? Or the Advisory Board or committee? What power will people on a governing board or body have over the project?
• How do you co-lead a project/organization?
• How do you manage conflict within your team?
• How do you choose a diverse Advisory Board and how do you set the right expectations? How to choose members? How best to respect their time? How to best utilize their expertise/guidance? Is it useful to rotate/refresh your AB members or keep consistency?
• How do you handle a public crisis within your team?
• How to convert a community member into a team member?

By Daisie Huang

👋 You: You're starting a project that you hope will be adopted and used by your entire community, or at least a bunch of your colleagues and friends. You may already have an idea of what the product will look like in the end, and maybe you're already thinking about what tools you'll be using.

❓Why: Before you start building things, it's a good idea to think about the choices you have in deciding how and when and where your community will interact with your project. Do you foresee using many contributors and developers? Do you think that your project will primarily be used as a research tool by individual researchers, or is it meant to be a community resource that aggregates contributions by many researchers? Your answers to these questions may shape your choices on infrastructure.

👟 Take a step back! Before you start making decisions about your favorite technology stack or development platform, you should think about the infrastructure and trajectory of your project.

Questions to ask yourself

1. How will the project develop over time?

A project may need different infrastructure at different stages of growth. It's hard to predict a project's needs ahead of time, but planning for growth with a solid infrastructure strategy (and a governance plan) will set you up for success.

Check out these links to find resources that will help you adjust to your project's changing needs:

• Mozilla Open Leadership's Open Canvas / Lean Canvas tool for scoping a project, users, and stage of growth (blog post | tutorial)
• An introduction to agile software development models and methods
• How to set up continuous integration

2. Where should your project live?

If you're developing a research tool, consider who your future users will be. Are they tech-savvy researchers who will be comfortable with installing software on their own computers? Will your users have consistent internet access? Do they primarily do their research on their own computers, through a separate server, or directly on the Web? If you're developing a mobile app, will your users have internet access while they're using your app? Will a significant number of users be expected to contribute code changes?

If you're developing a community or a community tool, consider how often your users will interact with each other and in what ways. Are they primarily interacting with each other through code fixes and data contributions? Are they going to be sharing personal experiences with each other? Will there be in-person meetups, and if so, how many and how often? Can community calls and online meetings substitute for in-person interaction? How interactive do you expect your web presence to be?

3. How will the community relate to the project?

It's useful to consider your community values from the beginning. If you put this off until problems emerge, it will be much harder to decide how and if to enforce unspoken values.

Design resources

• Design Thinking Process Guide - guide to approaching design thinking problems, from the Institute of Design at Stanford
• Design Thinking Handbook - open handbook that walks readers through the design thinking process
• Design Kit - free pdf Ideo field guide to human-centered design
• Open Source Design Community - GitHub community for open source design logos, resources, and templates
• Open Source Design Materials from Mozilla - Mozilla’s GitHub repository for the open design process, featured in their blog
• Design Method Toolkit - toolkit of hands-on exercises for ideation, concept, prototyping, interviewing, and more

Additional design process and resources are discussed by Joey Lee here and here!

Norms and conduct resources:

Codes of conduct

• Public Lab Code of Conduct
• ROpenSci Unconf Code of Conduct
• ROpenSci Developer Guide
• Mozilla Science Lab guide to developing community guidelines

Norms and ethics for open source communities

• Participating in Open Source
• Open Source Etiquette Guidebook
• Collaborative Etiquette
• Go Make Things Guide
• Google Summer of Code Student Guide
• CONTRIBUTOR.md Tutorial
• GitHub Flow for Novices
• Helping an Open Source Project on GitHub
• Network-centric Resources
• OS Guides: Finding users for your project

By Aurelia Moser

Aurelia Moser was the Community Lead at the Mozilla Science Lab, a broad-reaching community of researchers, educators, tinkerers and librarians working to make scientific research more open and accessible to all on the web. Here she discusses her experience managing this community. Photo: Screenshot of a Mozilla Science Lab Community Call.

There are so many aspects of community development to share, but one that seems peculiar to Mozilla, though likely transferable to many technical/research collaborations, is the geographic scope of community development. Mozillians come from all “scientific” research interest areas (from the hard sciences to the social sciences to the library sciences), all career stages (from undergraduates to citizen scientists, to post-docs, to faculty), and all geographic, social, ethnic, and cultural identities. Developing a community that includes participants across all demographics, professional stages, and geographies is challenging, particularly when most of the community coordination happens asynchronously through technologies that while wonderful, are often vulnerable to limitations of access. It can be tempting to believe that when you use open source tools to facilitate community interactions, or rely on seemingly “open” platforms, somehow your community is accessible to all, but Mozilla often finds that collaborative tools like Github, Gitter, our own website and Etherpad are reliably available to a subset of the community we’d like to serve. Where internet bandwidth is strong, and researcher have time and funding to commit to open, we succeed in fostering community; where it is weak and time and funding are limited, we often failed to support community members.

Where internet bandwidth is strong, and researcher have time and funding to commit to open, we succeed in fostering community; where it is weak and time and funding are limited, we often failed to support community members.

Developing a diverse community means considering accessibility as paramount to web, infrastructure, and program design. We made a point to host regular events (Community Calls) where people could join via phone, web, or video broadcast to learn about our activities and co-promote the research projects that we featured and championed in our community. We conducted semi-monthly book clubs on social media where community members could read and engage with us remotely, and without the need for video bandwidth or Etherpad load support. We ran quarterly in-person events, maintained old-school list-servs, hosted a chat presence on MatterMost, Gitter, IRC (for a time) and multiple platforms across the networks of our small team. Even so, we definitely didn’t reach everyone. Each year, we brought our fellows to meet a “new” community we’d supported through our Study Groups Program (a GitHub project to develop peer learning communities around open source code curriculum, free for the forking online), and each year we encountered a new community that we had yet to properly engage in our full suite of opportunities.

There were times when team members would need to keep several tabs, and 4 applications open constantly to ensure we were monitoring all of our “channels” of engaging with community members. It can feel untenable. We did create some efficiencies which I would recommend, like using Zapier and IFTTT to integrate alerts across GitHub, email, and Gitter/IRC, by “mirroring” content across applications we were able to maintain activity in multiple channels without going mad.

One thing to learn from this experience, is that community development, where the goal is to foster far-reaching impact, involves constant work to diversify the modes of contribution, collaboration, and communication.

Impactful Community development is building an arsenal of tools that meet communities where they are. It means engaging them in activities that suit their workflows, and not just precedent preferences of the existing community. It means developing a code of conduct and a process to enforce and update it, to accommodates new issues and new community needs. It is constant labor and you’re never done! But if you commit to continuous iteration and empathy, you’ll have success in developing quality connections that open you to new “leaders” in communities you’ve yet to fully integrate, and making sure those folks are valued and supported leads to better and more accessible initiatives.

Many of the great movements, companies and projects start with a single person. Maturing an idea into a project on your own can be difficult, but the open community wants to help.

This post applies to you if you have an idea or an intention to start a project or are already working on a project all by yourself. You may be receiving support from your work or an affiliated institution. But you do not work with other people on the project – you alone are responsible for the project.

Working as an individual can be challenging, but below we provide some guidance on how to grow your project and transition to a team environment as your work develops.  

Why to work in the open

Working in the open is great for a variety of reasons, but it's especially useful for individuals. That's because anyone with an idea to initiate a program and connect to a broader community of interested and engaged contributors who can assist in developing the project.

As an individual, you are able to easily and freely access many resources and help with research, community building, education, and tool building, which will make your work more impactful. Inviting a diversity of perspectives and voices to participate can improve your products. Getting that feedback would be much more difficult if you were responsible for building all of those perspectives into your own team in a traditional entrepreneurship environment.

A how-to guide for getting started

Below is a basic how-to for getting started as an individual with an open project. It is not a comprehensive explanation, nor is it the only way to get started. We are offering it as an example framework for how to get started.

This guide is heavily influenced by the work of the Mozilla Open Leaders program, which is an essential piece of any introduction to working in the open. Here are some steps you should consider taking to get the most out of working in the open.

1. Define your question. The first step in creating an open project is to establish the question or problem that you seek to explore, answer, or solve. You are the inspiration and will dictate your own agenda.

2. Formulate your project. Start developing the question or problem into a project by considering the general form your project will take. Think about the scope of the project and how participants will engage with it.

3. Refine your project vision. The project vision communicates the aspirational goal of the project. It signals to the world what the project wants to accomplish.

4. Develop a project strategy. Use a tool like Open Canvas to generate all the critical components of the program. We recommend Open Canvas because it is a deceptively simple exercise. It's only one page! But it's a challenge because it forces you to get specific about your project's unique value and consider how you will measure success early in the process.

5. Create a README file. A README is a plain text document that tells users and contributors about the project or product. This document contains essential information and instructions for using or contributing to the project or product. You can get ideas about how to structure this from examples of READMEs online.

6. Set up a roadmap. This project plan will help you establish what steps you need to take, keep you on track, and provide a guide for contributors to your project.

7. Sell your project. Promoting your project is extremely important. Refer back to the communication channels you devised in your Open Canvas project strategy exercise.  

8. Get people involved. Establish meaningful and equitable ways people can get involved at all levels. Think about what they will receive in return for their efforts in contributing to the project.

9. Write a code of conduct. Creating meaningful and equitable avenues for people to become involved at all levels requires rules of conduct and group norms. Being able to create a welcoming, inclusive, safe space is extremely important to an open project.

10. Keep working. Finally, keep going! It may take some time for your project to take off, gain contributors, or complete – and that's okay. The important thing is to plan well, be patient with yourself, and keep developing your project.

Finding mentorship

There are great training programs like the Mozilla Open Leaders program that can help you get started, and provide education and mentorship. Also, you may want to consider joining an open project to see how they work and judge if it's a model you are interested in pursuing. Finally, consider reaching out to organizers of projects you find interesting to learn about their process.

By Daniela Saderi and Monica Granados

[We need to] release any assumption that one person has all the skills needed to lead and support the work. Decentralized work requires more trust-building on the front end, but ultimately it is easier, more fluid. – adrienne maree brown

If our goal is to tackle complex problems, then we need complex organizations with diverse leadership. Co-leadership of a project, a team, or an organization is when more than one people are in charge. The role of open leaders is to listen, engage people, explore ideas, and -- most importantly -- craft a mission with input from the whole team, and communicate it clearly to the world.

The premier benefit of co-leadership is that your project will benefit from more expertise. It’s impossible to do everything, and even less possible to be good at everything. Strong leadership is about having the self-awareness to accept your blind spots and finding someone to fill the gaps.

The nature of co-leadership

If you are in a leadership position, make sure you have a circle of people who can tell you the truth, and to whom you can speak the truth. Bring others into shared leadership with you, and/or collaborate with other formations so you don’t get too enamored of your singular vision. – adrienne maree brown

When successful, co-leadership can be the essence of a resilient project or organization. It is challenging, however, because it’s not the standard structure for organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, and it's not the default way of working in Western society as a whole.

But if our goal is to shift the culture towards open and transparent models for building our future, we need to learn how to work with others, especially those who have completely different stories, experiences, and personalities. Only then we will be able to make sustainable and cohesive change and evolve as a global human society.

The content below is meant to guide you, either as the individual who originated the idea for the project or as the person who decided to take an idea to the next level and begin a project.

How to approach co-leadership

Don't do it alone – turn to the people around you to hear reactions and perspectives on your idea. Find at least one other person who would like to invest time to consider the idea and help you craft the strategy to bring it to the next level.

Now that you have at least one partner, how do you navigate that relationship? How do you ensure that your ego does not take over and alienate others? How do you prioritize collaborating and ensuring all ideas are put forward and considered?

The first step is awareness!

Start by thinking about how you interact with others. Do you like those interactions? Are you open to listening to others’ ideas, perspectives, solutions, and challenging your own assumptions? Are you open to being wrong and adapting to the changed circumstances?

If the answer to these questions is “not really,” congratulations, you are a human being who needs to take the time and spend vital energy to grow into a better collaborative member of your community.

Demystify the charismatic rock star leader

Funders have traditionally preferred the narrative of a rock star leader, and have invested in individuals more than in mission. [...] Rock stars get isolated, lose touch with our vulnerability, are expected to pull off superhero work, and generally burn out within a decade. – adrienne maree brown

The default organizational structure, at least in the modern Western culture, is to have one leader who makes executive decisions and represents the entire project. In its more extreme form, this could be called the model of the charismatic "rock star” leader.

While there are examples in history that suggest this model can be successful, we have also witnessed instances in which entire movements have collapsed because that one leader is crushed by the load of responsibility. While co-leadership can also lead to disaster if disagreement and conflict among group members is permitted to trump the common goal, it is on balance a much better leadership approach if those involved are willing to do the hard work of facilitating successful collaboration.

The best part about co-leading a project or organization is that you are not alone. That can be true also if you are the only leader, but you have put work towards building a team around you that feels empowered to contribute to the “pool of meaning” and speak up on critical decisions.

Ingredients for successful co-leadership

• Let go of your ego
• Cultivate trust
• Have a clear mission
• Get to know the people you work with and connect on an emotional level
• Be honest with yourself and others
• Practice generosity and vulnerability to make connections with others clear, open, real, and durable
• Relax under pressure
• Learn how to lean on others’ strength, recognize when you need a break, and ask for help
• Learn how to give each other space to feel and be human
• Acknowledge you have limits and that your ideas might not be the best way to approach a problem
• Be aware that this process is hard; it is nonlinear and necessarily iterative, so be open to learning along the way

Questions to ask yourself and your team

• How do we build a diverse team?
• What is the appropriate size for a team?
• How do we determine what is right for the project?
• How do we give team members a purpose/role that they can be passionate about?
• How do we manage conflict within our team?
• How do we best to respect and use the expertise of the board of directors and the advisory board?
• How will we handle a public crisis within our team?
• How do we convert a pass-by into a team member?
• When do we assign a Board of Directors?
• How do we choose a diverse advisory board and how do you set the right expectations?
• Is it useful to rotate/refresh board members or keep consistency?

Challenges of co-leadership

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. – African proverb

Embracing co-leadership often comes along with embracing decentralized teams, since central control and direction is less important when multiple leaders are working collaboratively on a join goal. Decentralized teams are likely to be self-directed, with each person working independently from their respective home offices or coworking spaces. This freedom presents some challenges not faced in a traditional working environment.

Building relationships and trust

Many communities that arise from open projects bring together strangers in service of the greater good. In these circumstances it can be a challenge to build relationships and trust within the team.

Trust cannot be built instantaneously, but there are efforts you can make to facilitate it. Delegating tasks is a great way to build team trust. You show your team members that you trust that they will complete the task, and they are able to demonstrate that the trust was well placed when they completed the task successfully.

To build a team that trusts each other, ensure everyone is contributing to the “pool of meaning,” as described in the book Crucial Conversations. The best way to communicate with others on your team is to focus on the goal, not the person.

Keeping everyone informed

Remote leaders face the question of how to keep team members informed without them having to be involved in every aspect of a task. The increase frequency in remote work has given rise to many tools to help bridge the physical distance of distributed teams.

Project management tools like Asana, Trello and Microsoft Project are helping teams define and assign tasks. These types of software have task management graphical user interfaces that allow you to explicitly define tasks, set deadlines for these tasks, and assign them to team members.

Working with different time-zones

This is another common issue with distributed teams, especially with larger teams spread across the world. People may have to work odd hours to connect with team members around the world, so it's essential to be flexible about when and how people complete their work.

Accommodating various work-life time restrictions

Working with a distributed team of people who are passionate about the project means you'll have people in all different locations with various other obligations to attend to.

If you're a good leader, you'll be encouraging diversity of various kinds on your team, which will further expand the work-life and time needs your team brings to the work. Being flexible and accommodating about people's needs is essential to building team trust, motivating people to do their best work, and ultimately facilitating the success of the project.

Resources

• Inclusive hiring
• Lead with clarity
• Diversity on nonprofit boards
• Pyramid of clarity to develop your mission
• DataActive/BigBang: a tool for evaluating open source communities  
• Folks Who Code
• Guide to co-leadership article
• Open Science Framework (OSF)

Books that inspired this piece

• Emergent Strategy – by andrienne maree brown
• Crucial Conversations – by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler    

Social movements are group or collective action that attempt large scale change for a demographic of society. The nature, structure, and impact of social movements varies. David Aberle (1966) describes four types of social movement: alternative, redemptive, reformative, and revolutionary. Each type is based on who the movement is attempting to change and how much change the movement is advocating.

What is an open scholarship movement?

The Budapest Open Access Initiative gave open access its first big push on Feb. 14, 2002. However, its origins were earlier – arguably in 1991, when Paul Ginsparg started the arXiv repository at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAN-L) to make preprints in physics freely accessible.

With this long history to support this movement, why hasn't it succeeded in achieving more openness by now? A 2018 study by H. Piwowar et. al. estimates that at least 28 percent of the scholarly literature is open access (19 million in total). As the definition of open scholarship has expanded to include open data, open source, open resources, and open education at a minimum, the rate of success is significantly lower.

In general, efforts are piecemeal, disconnected, and sometimes in competition with one another rather than in competition with the proprietary, commercial world the movement ostensibly exists to challenge.

In the face of this reality, we have to ask ourselves several questions:

• How do we turn our active and thriving communities into a movement that takes collective action?
• How do we unify initiatives and projects into categories of work, and get them to work together and consolidate activities?
• How do we create a “central nervous system” such as a backbone organization that coordinates, sets common purposes, and channels funding to those within the movement?

What makes a successful social movement

Considering the actions of the many players in the open scholarship space as a unified collective action – a movement -- offers an opportunity to have dramatically increased impact over a reduced period of time.

There are several common steps that most successful social movements tend to follow:

1. One or more communities or initiatives forms around a common goal
2. The communities and initiatives begin to mobilize resources
3. Disparate efforts begin to consolidate and construct a shared strategy and pooled resources
4. A central governing body or set of leading organizations collect future resources and solidify strategy, operations, and communications
5. The movement is accepted by or replaces the status quo or establishment

The importance of a backbone organization

The collective impact approach to social change is premised on the belief that no single policy, government department, organization, or program can tackle or solve the increasingly complex social problems we face as a society.

A defining feature of the collective impact approach is the role of a backbone organization – a separate organization dedicated to coordinating the various dimensions and collaborators involved in the initiative.

Supporting backbone infrastructure is essential to ensuring the collective impact effort maintains momentum and facilitates impact. Creating such infrastructure will be essential to facilitating the growth and impact of the open access movement.

Resources

For more on this topic, watch Kristen Ratan's FORCE11 2018 keynote Learning from the enemy: building a successful open science movement from the rubble, and read Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis and Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown.

If you dream about fostering change, it’s important to find and collaborate with the right people. Chances are that you alone won’t be able to shift a whole system in the direction you care about. You need a team and a community. We hope that our communities can come together as a successful open scholarship movement that can affect lasting and sweeping change.

“We need to become the systems we need, step outside the comfort of the current and lean into the unknown, together.” – Adrienne Maree Brown – Emergent Strategy

The problems we face as a human society are complicated and require complex solutions. Humans often react to such complexity in counterproductive ways. We compete when it is not necessary, when collaboration would be much more sustainable. We too often use our intelligence to smash others -- to suppress and oppress – and to gather power for ourselves. Sometimes we do so inadvertently even when our intentions are good.

We need to learn how to prioritize impact over intention, how to depend on each other, and how to work as individuals in a group. This means truly listening to each other, creating systems in which everyone is important, and organizing our actions to be the most effective.

So the question becomes: How do we grow a truly decentralized, inclusive, and resilient movement?

One answer is to be intentional in decentralizing our idea of who identifies problems and where, and who makes decisions about how to address them.

During the OSAOS Open Handbook July meeting, the “people group” tried to answer this important and complex question by breaking the high-level concept of “people” down into four sub-sections: individual, team, community, movement. They then brainstormed a list of questions, how-to’s, resources, and personal stories for each of these sub-sections. The brainstorming included anything that can be useful to individuals and teams who are currently working within the open source and open science communities, as well as to newcomers who are willing to explore this world and find out how they can be part of it.

The ideas in this section are by no means the result of a decentralized and inclusive brainstorming session -- for the most part, they came from the biased minds of a small and privileged group of people.

What we hope will happen is that this document will exist as a living and evolving document. We planted the seed for this tree to grow, and we tried in a few days to give it fertile soil and water. Now it is up to us all to ensure this tree grows straight, influenced by winds coming from all directions.

Individuals become teams, teams become groups, groups become communities, communities become a movement. Without community, we don’t have a life.