Merge pull request #18 from fvera02/maintainers-contributors-roundtable

add Stanford OSPO Maintainers & Contributors pattern

Author: CiaraFlanagan

maintainers-contributors-roundtable.md

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+# Maintainers & Contributors Roundtable
+
+# Pattern Summary
+
+Convene a community of practice consisting of students and staff who are actively maintaining or contributing to university open source software projects in the research enterprise. Based on Lave & Wenger's "Situated Learning," we interpret a community of practice as a vibrant learning community where members collectively work towards gaining knowledge and competencies connected to their shared interests.
+
+# Problem / Challenge
+
+Active open source software maintainers and contributors are often scattered across laboratories and departments on university campuses. In many cases, maintainers find themselves in isolated roles without a way of learning about each other’s work or a means of connecting. A certain proportion of maintainers are experts in their research field but not in open sources software development and lack the awareness of where and how to find the information they need. Open source is both a technical and social system, and so we leverage that by creating spaces for people to learn from each other.
+
+# Pattern Category
+- Community Building
+- Education & Skills
+- Open Source Discovery
+- Promoting Best Practices
+   
+# Context
+
+A research university creates large volumes of research outputs across every discipline.
+
+A university wishes to convene a community of practice comprising of developers, maintainers, coding leads, and similar stakeholders of open source software projects to facilitate the sharing of project activity, best practices, and pain points, and promote engagement of technical team members with the OSPO.
+
+A Research Software Engineer (RSE) or equivalent group does not currently exist (or lacks visibility) on campus.
+
+# Forces
+
+There is a growing or established interest in creating a community space for maintainers or contributors to open source software. This includes creating a space for learning where learning is a social exercise.
+
+Students and staff who are actively maintaining or contributing to university open source software projects but want to connect with peers in similar roles or do not know where to access advice.
+
+An OSPO or community lead with capacity to plan monthly meetings.
+
+An OSPO that wishes to learn about the project activity and technical painpoints directly from maintainers and contributors.
+
+# Solution
+
+* **How do you promote it?**
+  - We reach out to PI's of labs developing open source software to put us in touch with the maintainer(s) and core contributor(s) of the project, who we then directly invited. This outreach typically happens at the start of the academic year when faculty and lab members are more responsive. As people attend meetings throughout the year, we find that many ask to invite peers in the same program or in their labs, and we have benefited from this organic approach.
+  - We periodically invite new members to join us by promoting the community on our OSPO mailing list.
+  - We also maintain a rotating list of most commonly discussed topics on our OSPO website to give prospective members a sense of what may be discussed at any one meeting.
+  - We get organic referrals from our OSPO community - people find out about the Maintainers & Contributors Roundtable by nature of the social networking component.
+* **What is the format?**
+  - We host monthly meetings at lunchtime for 1 hour and provide lunch for in-person attendees. We also provide a Zoom option for remote members.
+  - We have a dedicated Slack channel for members to connect, meaning anyone with an issue they would like input on can ask for feedback immediately, rather than waiting a month for the next meeting.
+  - We observe Chatham House Rules at all meetings, and reinforce those norms regularly.\
+  - We adopt a "vote with your feet" approach, meaning we expect people to attend only to the extent at which the meeting is valuable to them. This stems from our underlying philosophy that it is the OSPO's responsibility to continuously provide value to this group.
+* **How do you run the meetings?**
+  - To strenghten the OSPO's relationship with developers, maintainers, coding leads, and similar stakeholders in attendance, we begin each meeting with OSPO updates and announcements.
+  - The tone of the meeting is very casual and conversational, designed to allow everyone to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Typically, a member of the OSPO will take on the role of facilitator.
+  - We remind attendees constantly of our norms and expectations of confidentiality (Chatham House Rules).
+  - We organize a single meeting around a core topic/theme or specific project. Using Slack (or other communication channel), we are able to extract relevant topics and ideas members might be interested in or motivated by and ask them up/down vote on a topic of choice for the next meeting.
+     - In cases where we feature a specific project, we keep track of who solicits the OSPO's help and offer the roundtable meeting as a forum to get feedback (conducted under Chatham House Rules unless requested otherwise).
+     - Where possible, we personally reach out to community members whose expertise matches the pain points discussed to advise the presenter in real-time at the meeting.
+
+# Resulting Context
+
+Creating a dedicated on-campus space for open source software maintainers and contributors fosters an essential sense of community, effectively alleviating the isolation many have previously experienced in their roles. This newfound connection encourages the sharing of knowledge, skills, and experiences. Encouraging developers, coding leads, research scientists, and similar stakeholders to build relationships with each other also instills a supportive network that can lead to collective problem-solving, particularly if members are willing to seek feedback on specific aspects of their project. Moreover, hosting this community of practice can strengthen the relationships between the members and the OSPO, enabling the OSPO to engage members on other OSPO inititaves (e.g. workshops, consultations, mentorship).
+
+A particularly valuable result is that members continue to stay in touch outside of monthly meetings. Having a dedicated communication channel (e.g. dedicated Slack channel, mailing list) for members to continue to share ideas, solicit advice, and build connection has made the monthly meeting cadence feel appropriate since there are many asynchronous touchpoints between meetings. We also maintain an active alumni group (comprised of former members who have moved on to other academic or industry positions) and welcome them at meetings and on Slack.
+
+In line with our aim to create a safe space for members, we do not invite faculty PI's to monthly meetings, unless there is a special session and we notify members in advance. We based this on a simple idea that people behave differently when the "boss" is in the room, and we received positive feedback from members about this choice. However, there is possibility for convening an alternative community of practice that allows faculty members in the case where the faculty member IS the maintainer of the project and would find valuable learning from a community of other project maintainers.
+
+# Known Instances
+
+* OpenSource@Stanford, Stanford University https://opensource.stanford.edu/programs/maintainers-contributors-roundtable
+* UC Open Source Contributors & Maintainers Virtual Meetup https://bids.berkeley.edu/news/building-bridges-highlights-inaugural-uc-open-source-meetup
+
+# References
+
+* Lave, Jean, and Étienne Wenger-Trayner. *Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation*. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
+* Brown, John Seely, et al. *The Social Life of Information*. Harvard Business Review Press, 2017. 
+
+# Contributors & Acknowledgement
+
+* Francesca Vera https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8791-3854
+* Zach Chandler https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2402-9839
+* Ciara Flanagan https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3153-7673