Questions to ask people from diverse communities

[aidanbudd]

We discussed and (I think) agreed that a good way to add content linked to experiences from many different OS scientific communities, would be to directly contact people working on those communities, asking for their feedback.

We thought we could create a file in the repo for those people to fork and pull request on to collect the info - while also providing a googleform for them to use if they prefer to contribute in that way - then, if they're interested in being included as an author on the article, they'll need to give us a way of contacting them to follow up.

We thought a good way to collect this feedback would be to ask them a few (max. 3?) questions linked to their community.

How about these three questions? Please send any comments/edits/changes to these, I just put them forward as a way of kick-starting discussion. I found I wanted to provide also a text contextualising the questions - otherwise it was too hard to sum up the details of what I think we're looking for in just a couple of sentences. Very glad for feedback also on the context text.

"We would like to understand better, the features of great open source scientific communities. We've written together a list of features we think are shared by most or all communities of this kind that many of their participants (and others) would consider great:

• give
• the
• list

We'd like to illustrate how these features are an important for making these communities great, and give practical tips on how to achieve them, using anecdotes taken from the activities of communities of this kind.

With this in mind, please send us examples of anecdotes from the activities of your communities, that illustrate:

• challenges that you overcame, and how you overcame them, to build and maintain a great community
• ways in which your community benefits from displaying some of the features from this list

We're particular interested in collecting anecdotes linked to the open source, software-focused, natures of these communities - we hope that will make what we collect as useful as possible as a source of inspiration and advice for others working in other OS scientific communities.

We've created a file in the github repo we're using to collect these anecdotes - you are very welcome to fork the file and make your contribution using a pull request - that makes it easy to keep track of who's contributing what to the project (if we are able to turn the resulting information into a published manuscript, we'll contact everyone who's contributed to it, and invite them to join us as authors on it). Or, if you prefer, you can just send your feedback to me here at this email address. In that reply, please indicate whether or not you want us to make a note in the repo that you've contributed to it, and if so by what name."

[joncison]

Is the idea of "give-the-list" to summarise - or give the whole text - of listOfFeaturesOfGreatOSBCs.md ?

If "summarise" then I'd suggest providing a link to the md, as some folks, once they see it, will want to contribute directly to it.

That said, I like the notion of collecting anecdotes, because that cements the principles in dirty reality ...

[aidanbudd]

Thanks for the feedback, Jon.

Hm. Idea was to summarise/help prompt the people we contact to give them some 'inspiration' when thinking about/reflecting on the activities of 'their' communities.

And/yes/but - would of course be great if they then chose to get more involved than by 'just' sending in info on anecdotes.

Based on your feedback, Jon, I'd list the 'features' simply in the email, but provide also a link to the file itself in the repo, so that they can (as you say) contribute directly and in other ways if they keen to do so.