---
# System prepended metadata

title: Drafting a future governance for CodeRefinery

---

# CodeRefinery governance (draft)

Authors: RB, RD

:::info
- **Executive summary**: The goal is to define mission, vision, and guiding principles
  and to define and set up a decision body and process which would take over the
  responsibilities starting 2025-01-01.
  There are many blanks and questions below. To be discussed and worked out.
  Goal is to have a starting point that the team and steering group
  is comfortable with and to form a working group which will work out details.
- This document: https://hackmd.io/@coderefinery/governance
:::

:::danger
Questions:
- Mission, vision, guiding principles: what is missing?
- Initial board composition? The NeIC project partners? What if they prefer not to or are inactive?
  - proportional to activity 2023-2024?
- What if a board member leaves?
- Can community elect a board member?
  - Should be able to, yes.
- What decision necessitates board input?
  - Initially guiding principles (part of foundation document), in principle anything they haven't delegated to a CM.
- At which level of support should a partner be offered a board seat?
  - Board decides.  Initial principle is "those with in-kind work".
- "This is a volunteer organizaiton, no person has any requirement to do anything." - this is currently not the case but maybe we want this to be the case?
  - I guess that's more for community, rather than paid staff.  Paid staff do what their employer says.
- Responsibilities for future board: what should be left out or added?
- Who/what has ownership over intelectual property? Maybe case-by-case?
  - case: teaching material publicly available – CC-licence?
  - case: 
  - Transfering IP is probably very hard.  Distributed IP is probably needed.
- Independent non-profit organization
- Find the carpentries cooporation model and propose them to be in the board
    - E.g. Science library of University of Oslo
:::

[toc]


## What is CodeRefinery

(introduction)


## Mission, vision, and guiding principles

(RD: when thinking of these, think "what makes us different from others?")

Mission (what we do and why we do it¸ 2025):
- CodeRefinery improves science and research by providing education in the tools of computational science to a diverse audience.
    - ~~provides~~ intermediate level teaching more immediately applicable than one gets in academic courses.  We 
    - CR empowers XX by providing skills needed for achiving YY , through providing training on practical skills. 
- ~~We are a training network because together we can develop and deliver better training than alone.~~
- fill gaps between acamedia's lack of training in certain areas
- preparing people and communities for high-performance computing and AI
- foster a culture of FAIR, collaboration and openness in research software parctices

Vision (what we want to achieve):
- We create a highly skilled academic community who can do better, more reproducible science.
- Our core workshops are a regular recommendation for any students or researchers who does computational research
- We have a wide variety of other rotating workshops, organized by partners but with contribution by many
- When research projects ~~write proposals that include training, they think about us and include us~~ need extra training, they think of us and our team.
- (...)
- skilled trainers and build knowledge transfer and build competence
- highly skilled researchers and staff
- Create a group of good trainers in partner institutes. 
- bringing academia into digital age
- equip society with tools for collaborative and reusable research


Guiding principles (when a difficult decision needs to be made, we invoke the following guiding principles):
- At our core, we are an open project and structure our working methods like one.  Our outputs are openly licensed with distributed copyright.
- We optimise for practical usability for those who lack skills in reproducible computational work.  We don't try to replace career-oriented IT training.
- Make people's lives easier.
    - suggest to make more tangible. 
- When in doubt, do what makes science/research/academics more reproducible.
- Make it easier for people and organizations to participate.
- Encourage collaboration when posssible to do so.


## Project governance 2016 - 2024

- Initially: NeIC board
- NeIC board transfers management to steering group via project directive
- Project partners each appoint a steering group member
- Steering group meets 2-3 times per year and makes big picture decisions
- Day to day decisions by project manager in communication with steering group and project owner (NeIC)
- Project manager reports to NeIC and project owner and steering group
- Project manager is responsible for the project budget
- Project manager tries to get support and consensus from the project team and community


## Scope and responsibilities for future board

- Strategic and organisational planning
- Ensuring the effective implementation of community objectives
- Financial oversight
- Business plan and budget plan
- Capacity plan
- Fostering collaboration among members
- Name, brand, and public image
- Steering the lesson portfolio
- Coordinate community initiatives
- Manage accounts: Freshdesk, Twitter, Fosstodon, GitHub, domain name, HackMD, Indico, chat, mailing list, GitLab, YouTube
- Manage the data and data sharing policies
- Contact point
- GitLab (maybe)
- Intellectual property


## Outline of the structure

- Partners: the institutions that collaborate, and unaffiliated inviduals
- Board: high-level strategy and help. Can be consulted on big decisions and for tricky trade-offs.  Within mission statement, delegates all other decisions to community managers.
- Community managers: Manage day-to-day work and connection with steering group. Build consensus among those doing the actual work for the day-to-day operations.
- Community: does work

---

Some organisations have customers that would benefit from our training. Those organisations could provide trainers for CodeRefinery because their customers get the training. 

## Board

- Initial board is one person per organization of the NeIC project.
- Board decides its future composition, probably once a year.
- Board confirms partner-level contributions.
- Board confirms community managers (likely with the community's input) and delegates most daily operation to them.


## Community managers

- Coordinate most of the day-to-day work.
- Are responsible to the board, but mainly lead the community in doing the work.
- Ensure rough consensus and push things forward if it can't be done.
- Can appoint (=recognize on the website) leads in different areas.


## Community

- Community doe most of the work, and should be recognized as decided by the community managers and board.
- This is a volunteer organizaiton, no person has any requirement to do anything.
- Members are expected to abide by our community standards of cooperation and respect.


## Code of conduct

We take our [code of conduct](https://coderefinery.org/about/code-of-conduct/) as starting point but suggest to adapt it to
the governance structure and decision making process.


## Conflict resolution

Questions to be worked out:
- What to do if there is conflict within leadership?
- Conflict within community?
- Conflict between leadership and community?
- What if a collaboration partner becomes problematic? (mission, guiding principles, code of conduct)


## Conflict resolution

Questions:
- What to do if there is conflict within leadership
- Conflict within community
- Conflict between leadership and community
- What if a collaboration partner becomes problematic? (mission, guiding principles, code of conduct)


## Community meetings, communication, and reporting mechanisms

This needs to be worked out.
Data sharing policy needs to be worked out.


## Amendments to the governance document

Board can change based on majority vote.


## Periodic review and evaluation

- How often do we review the governance document?
- How do we evaluate the success of the community and project?


## Inspirations for this document

- NeIC/NICEST2 project governance draft (big thanks to Anne Fouilloux)
- https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/02/revisions-to-the-carpentries-governance-structure/
- https://hackclub.com/team/
- https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/

## Letter to our managers

Hi [name],

As you know, I've worked with CodeRefinery for [duration], and I think it has had a great impact for our community.  Do you think I could keep working with this group in 2025 and after, once the project ends?

You can see our impact [here]: as you can see, [X] people from [my location] have been trained and XX% would recommend us (in our recent survey, [x]% of people would recommend us 10/10!).  [x]% of people say that thir research is more reproducible and [x]% have said they have introduced what we teach to colleagues.

We would like to continue like before: I spend [x]% of my time on the teaching, with an emphasis on our local audience.  In return, we all work together and put on much bigger and better courses than we could ourselves.  I would need to know that I can record the time to my existing [teaching] project.

In return, there would be a new steering group of the partner institutions where you, or someone, can give high level direction to the group.