jmtd → log → Red Hat at the Turing Institute

In Summer 2019 Red Hat were invited to the Turing Institute to provide a workshop on issues around building and sustaining an Open Source community. I was part of a group of about 6 people to visit the Turing and deliver the workshop. It seemed to have been well received by the audience.

The Turing Institute is based within the British Library. For many years I have enjoyed visiting the British Library if I was visiting or passing through London for some reason or other: it's such a lovely serene space in a busy, hectic part of London. On one occasion they had Jack Kerouac's manuscript for "On The Road" on display in one of the public gallery spaces: it's a continuous 120-foot long piece of paper that Kerouac assembled to prevent the interruption of changing sheets of paper in his typewriter from disturbing his flow whilst writing.

The Institute itself is a really pleasant-looking working environment. I got a quick tour of it back in February 2019 when visiting a friend who worked there, but last year's visit was my first prolonged experience of working there. (I also snuck in this February, when passing through London, to visit my supervisor who is a Turing Fellow)

I presented a section of a presentation entitled "How to build a successful Open Source community". My section attempted to focus on the "how". We've put out all the presentations under a Creative Commons license, and we've published them on the Red Hat Research website: https://research.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/open-source-at-the-turing/

The workshop participants were drawn from PhD students, research associates, research software engineers and Turing Institute fellows. We had some really great feedback from them which we've fed back into revisions of the workshop material including the presentations.

I'm hoping to stay involve in further collaborations between the Turing and Red Hat. I'm pleased to say that we participated in a recent Tools, practices and systems seminar (although I was not involved).