Building a community

[LJ.Garcia]

Dear all,

In the past days we have seen two people leaving the group. They are of course welcome to join again if they decide to do so. Until then, I kindly ask you all to respect their decision and do not cc them.

We are sad to see discomfort in the group and will work on it. We are and want to be welcoming and open and want to build a community together where everybody happily hacks and contributes with ideas, discussions, analyses and possible solutions to the current COVID-19 crisis. 

This is the first time for most of us participating on a virtual BioHackathon, as large as this one, and under such stressful circumstances. We all can feel lost at moments so please bear with each other and help each other find the way together. 

Kind regards, 

[Pjotr Prins]

Let me add to this that we set up the biohackathon to fight a pandemic
that is likely going to kill millions. We are all on edge. We have
loved ones, often far away in other countries, in my case across the
Atlantic, who are aged, may get no help and may die without us having
a chance of seeing them again. A war metaphor is apt. A week feels
like a year and society may disintegrate in places. We may become
refugees (in some sense we are). Believe me, my family is not feeling
safe where we are. Anywhere else it is probably even less safe. I have
heard several people say they have no bandwidth, which goes to show
the stress we are under. Having no bandwidth correctly describes well
where we are. All of us.

So far, two respected scientists have written that they feel
maltreated and want nothing to do with the biohackathon. We are sad
about that. Not least because we think we need the tools to get
worldwide sharing of sequence information, variants and disease
predictors sorted in a free software and free data setup. We need all
the help we can get. I am sure we make mistakes on the trot. I myself
make mistakes, and I apologize for any mistakes I have made. As these
two were pointed out in particular: I promise I won't suggest to close
threads again and I promise I won't merge pull requests again.

As organizers of the biohackathon we were not democratically chosen to
do the job. We took it on ourselves as volunteers and scientists to
stand up in this time to do something about a pandemic, rallying the
troops and catalyzing the effort. Behind the scenes we are putting
real work in, but as we still have 8 days to go I think it is an idea
to elect organizers at this stage through a ballot. I am happy we got
this far and will not mind passing the baton to someone more competent
than me.

Who here wants to organize an election for independent biohackathon
leadership? We have a few important meetings set up next week so we
should complete over the weekend. I won't put myself up for election,
but I am ready to support any champion for the cause.

Pj.

[Barbara Vreede]

Dear all,

Let me start by saying thanks to Tazro, Leyla, and Pjotr for kickstarting this community. It it is heartening to be able to do something concrete to combat this current situation, and is impressive how much momentum has gathered in such a short period of time.

I will also add that I'm still not sure I will be able to participate; largely because I am at home with a kid at this point, with a fair amount of work on my plate, and am already over capacity.

Nevertheless, I wanted to put my two cents in regarding community building.

Having a good code of conduct, like several have noted already, is elementary to a healthy community. As also has been mentioned, having a code of conduct that nobody has signed up on, participated in creating, or even read, is meaningless. A first step towards a healthy community would therefore be to step this up to a constructive discussion about a code of conduct. This makes an open pull request for a code of conduct useful, because it gives others the opportunity to review the code, as was explicitly requested by Malvika.

I'm taking the liberty to once again open a pull request devoted explicitly to the code of conduct. While the change in it is small, the invite is to review and respond to the Code of Conduct as a whole: https://github.com/virtual-biohackathons/covid-19-bh20/pull/5

Lastly, and especially given the capacity this community has shown already to self-organize, I would gently steer away from elections, and rather focus on the community itself as a self-governing entity. Having a mutual goal, respect for one another, and a fundamental understanding of the conduct we strive to uphold, should be the focus at this point. While this may seem straightforward, it is not trivial, and should therefore receive appropriate attention by all community members.

Kind regards,

Barbara Vreede

Barbara Vreede | Science Faculty Liaison | Utrecht University Library | Updated working hours (from home): Mon-Fri 10:00-16:00 and 20:00-22:00 | +31(0)6 83 99 65 01 (temporarily) | she/her/zij/haar

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[Rutger Vos]

Dear all,

I think it is important to have this conversation and we should indeed take a close look at any proposed code of conduct, consciously agree with it, and then uphold it. I read through Barbara's PR and I would be happy to sign on. I can also see that the calls in it for being welcoming, respectful, and understanding would give anyone of us a handle for approaching the designated contact person and seek some sort of redress/solution if we feel the group (or any particular member) is failing us.

Having said that, I get the sense that there is something else going on besides (mis)conduct. The other thing that is happening is that the biohackathon is a community that has been around for something like a decade, over the course of which an internal culture has developed. For newcomers, parts of that culture might come across as abrasive or unwelcoming - but what they encounter doesn't actually come from a bad place. Trying to get something done with a large group of people spread out all over the globe is often an exercise in maintaining focus and tying up loose ends. Actions such as closing (or proposing to close) threads and pull requests are being taken with that in mind. Biohackathon oldtimers might be doing that without perceiving this as being unwelcoming or disrespectful.

I don't dispute that this culture may have to change, and quickly at that. If it makes people feel unwelcome then it obviously should. I simply point this out to give some background to the social experiment we've all dived into headfirst with the best of intentions. We all want this to be a success, both socially and in what we produce. We are all under a lot of stress. Let's all have some patience with each other and cut each other some slack as we are trying to change on a dime and reinvent ourselves.

Be well everybody,

Rutger

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Met vriendelijke groet,

Dr. Rutger A. Vos

Researcher / Bioinformatician

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[Kevin B. Cohen]

Well and eloquently put, Barbara. 

Kev

Envoyé de mon iPad

Le 28 mars 2020 à 00:55, Barbara Vreede <b.vr...@gmail.com> a écrit :



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[Kevin B. Cohen]

Pjotr, your observation that over the course of the past 10 years the BioHackathon community has developed a culture of its own brings to mind the fact that the BioHackathon community brings together participants from a wide variety of national, linguistic, religious, etc. cultures.  It seems important and useful to keep that fact in mind and to consider giving each other some slack and some benefit of the doubt when deciding whether or not our own reactions—themselves products of our culture—match the probable of intent that would be ascribed to the corresponding actions in the culture of the person whose actions have given us offense. How exactly one does that in writing a code of conduct, I have no clue.  When the shared language of the hackathon is English, it seems likely to bias (in the statistical sense of that word) any stated code towards one of the major anglophone culture (presumably American).  Would such a bias be helpful?  The null hypothesis is that it would not.  The best alternative that I can think of would be a shared dictum of multiple cultures with which I have some familiarity—some version of “Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” “love thy neighbor as thyself,” etc. Having said that: my observation is that members of those cultures have struggled for centuries, and even for millennia, to live up to those very admirable sentiments—reflected, perhaps, by the archaic morphosyntax of their expressions in English... And of course, “what you would have done to you” is itself heavily culturally determined, as many Americans living in France, and French living in America, can attest (including me).

Kev

Envoyé de mon iPad

Le 28 mars 2020 à 00:55, Barbara Vreede <b.vr...@gmail.com> a écrit :



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[Rutger Vos]

That was actually me saying it, not Pjotr. But we're both Dutch so that just confirms your point about language bubbles and misunderstandings across them :)

Of course what you are saying is true. What is simply straightforward and direct in one culture (e.g. in Holland) comes across as unfathomably rude in another. Apologies in advance for that.

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