Values and principles#
Note: This page records the values and principles that guided the Research Community Management team, which was led by Malvika Sharan (2022–2024) and Emma Karoune (2025–2026). They are not a current organisational policy, but RCMs elsewhere can adapt them for their own communities.
The team described its approach in two parts: how it put the Turing’s values into practice in community management, and the principles it used to work together as a team.
Operationalising the Turing’s values in community management#
Transparency: Prioritise transparency and clarity in all communications, collaborations, and engagement pathways. This is a responsibility and duty towards peers and the communities the team leads.
Leadership: Apply open leadership practices in community-building processes that encourage community members to co-create additional knowledge and understanding, and to apply that knowledge.
Inclusivity: Embed equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) approaches in all work, and use community-based knowledge to improve the community or address the identified problem.
Respect: Maintain respectful co-creation processes in the team and the communities by providing clear ways to participate, engage, and lead through regular and ongoing opportunities.
Trust: Build trust in the community by making implicit knowledge explicit and providing access to resources that enable everyone to discover, display, and directly use their knowledge and skills.
Integrity: Ensure ethical integrity through the involvement of community members, especially those impacted by the team’s work.
Guiding principles of the RCM team#
Collaboration: Actively break down silos by enabling knowledge exchange across all projects through collaboration and joint efforts.
Communication: Communicate openly about your project, the communities involved, the challenges you are seeking to address, and the solutions that have emerged.
Professionalisation: Uphold the highest personal and professional standards, and share opportunities to co-create knowledge and infrastructure around community management and open research practices as a team.
Open leadership: Apply open leadership to foster open spaces for community engagement, and proactively find opportunities to collaborate in extending the goals and impact of open Research Community Management at the institutional level.
Peer support: Create a supportive and non-judgmental environment to engage each other, celebrate successes, admit errors, and draw learnings from each other’s work.
Dealing with conflict: Be willing to work through conflicts to resolution openly and constructively, and manage any relevant conflict of interest effectively.
Principle of change: Embrace the framework of change when responding to the needs of communities and stakeholders:
Change is a fundamental part of growth, and effective change must come from within individuals and groups.
Community engagement and growth start by first changing ourselves, our attitudes, language, and the way we view the world around us.
Communities are most successful when true partnerships exist and power or control is delegated and vested effectively within the community.
References#
Both sections draw insights from Bassler, A. et al. (2008). Developing Effective Citizen Engagement: A How-to Guide for Community Leaders. Center for Rural Pennsylvania.
The principle of change is taken from Guiding Principles of Effective Community Engagement by Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences.