Stepping back + call to action
Chris Fourie
Hi all,
As some may have gathered, I am stretched rather thin and finding it hard to keep up with my various volunteer commitments.
It is evident that I am increasingly dropping the ball on these efforts in order to prioritise my work with the South African Western Cape Provincial Health Data Centre - and as far as I can tell, my workload there is only going to increase in future as I am afforded more responsibilities.
I am stepping back from a number of my volunteer roles at SisonkeBiotik and elsewhere - at least for the rest of 2024. In light of this, I have been finding various individuals to take over these roles - I am carrying out handovers over the next couple months.
Sorry if these disruptions have impacted you personally, or if one has not been able to get through to me as quickly as is needed or at all 😔
The basis of a community, as I understand it, are the relationships/friendships/acquaintanceships between its members, whether those are 1-to-1 or 1-to-many (e.g. when making content - looking at you future “data science for health” influencers 👀). My personal goal at Sisonkebiotik is to foster activities around common interests that help develop these relationships. We have described Sisonkebiotik as a “grassroot participatory community” (https://openreview.net/pdf?id=jHY_G91R880), however I think “community of practice” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice) or perhaps even (at a stretch/playfully) a “guild” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild) would be appropriate - in that we have come together to build relationships around a common professional interest.
The reasons that motivate one to join a community can be multifaceted and deeply personal - I hope that our members find what they are looking for. If what you are looking for does not seem to be present, then I thoroughly encourage you to rally support and take efforts to try to make it present!
Each of us have different capacities to participate and each level of participation is valid (the orbital community model describes this well https://orbit.love/model/love/orbit-levels). There is no limit on how much any member is permitted to innovate or impact the community - and there is no contribution that is so small that it is not meaningful.
We have a steering committee and leadership teams for governance, long term strategy and coordination reasons - but any community member could step-up to drive something forward.If this is you - I encourage the community leadership to help empower you as a “directly responsible individual” (https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-responsible-individuals/) for your community activities.
As you may notice - this is a call to the community for individuals to put up their hands and get involved ✋🏽🤚🏿✋🏼 don’t wait for permission to do something - try do something - speak to other members 1-on-1, in small groups or in public - if you believe in it, try gather support for it!!
This is your community, you are welcome to make use of it in existing and novel ways.
Anyone can:
Make an announcement in the Discord announcement channel or via sending an email to our mailing list sisonk...@googlegroups.com
Post content that you think may be interesting or helpful
Make a new Discord channel
Start a regular meeting, project or event
Apply to join existing working groups for projects or events
Present their work or interest at a community online seminar
Host a panel session or community discussion
Start a local or online chapter or subcommunity that has a more focused interest within the space of data science for health in Africa
(it would be great to see more friends from plant and animal health around 🌳 🦓 🧬 - as our community name and logo suggest, this is a space for anyone who is interest in the health of anything that constitutes life - which also aligns with the WHO “One Health” initiative https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9223325/)Live stream their pair/mob coding session
Start a job listing spreadsheet
Start a community forum or social media platform (e.g. https://join-lemmy.org/)
Invent / trial a new community activity (“blog-a-thon” anyone? Perhaps prizes for the best post every month or quarter 🌟 I do think that more community created and curated content could be nifty!)
Literally any activity that you think could possibly help develop relationships between our community members
(as with our “community first” approach, we expect academic and other outputs to follow naturally, but are fundamentally a secondary concern)
Here is a great resource to help with this https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/index.html
It is hard to predict what the benefits will be exactly for your participation in our community, however the more members you meet and get to know, the more stories you will hear of how it has impacted their careers and lives.
I look forward to ramping up my participation in the community again in future!! 🫶🏼🌍
Chris
P.S.
I am currently helping with recovery efforts from a recent South African national health laboratory service ransomware / cyberattack - pathology lab result serving and historical data access services are down nationally so I have little to no time to interact with the community at the moment - quite pressingly for SisonkeBiotik, our website has gone down / been down for a bit - we need someone(s) to help build us a new website - please can someone drive this forward (community leadership please help coordinate) 🙏 we have previously used Google sites and Coda - however neither of these allow for a website that isn’t generic - additionally the Google site DNS records are not resolving for reasons that I do not have time to debug - so when there is a new website up - please send me the DNS records and I will add them to the www.sisonkebiotik.africa domain ☮️