Hello from Shauna — joining pyOpenSci as Research and Community Lead

Hi everyone — I’m Shauna Gordon-McKeon, and I’m joining pyOpenSci as Research and Community Lead.

This role covers both research and community work. Bringing experience from both domains, I’m interested in how those overlap more than in looking at them separately. Research on scientific open source only works if it’s grounded in community experience — how people actually review packages, onboard volunteers, decide whether a new tool belongs in their workflow, and handle tough problems like conflict, under-resourcing, and burnout. And communities (ours and others) benefit when we treat community problems as something worth studying systematically. As scientists, we can use our skills at noticing patterns, asking questions, and thinking critically about data to help solve the problems facing us.

More concretely: on the research side I’ll be supporting a Sloan Foundation–funded project on how AI tools are showing up in scientific open source. That includes surveys, focus groups, and community review sprints. On the community side I’ll be helping with day-to-day operations — peer review pathways, volunteering, docs, and governance.

Supporting Communities & Community Governance

Some of you may know me already from the broader Python and open source community. I’ve been coding in Python since 2008 but really dived into open source in 2013, when I was asked to run OpenHatch’s flagship program, Open Source Comes to Campus. We went to dozens of college campuses across the country, teaching students the tools and culture of open source and helping them make their first contributions. We also built curricula, guidebooks, and event templates so that local organizers could run the workshops themselves. OpenHatch introduced me to many of the people who became my friends, collaborators, and community in Python. It also taught me that helping people contribute isn’t mainly about finding them a tiny issue. It’s about giving them context, relationships, and room to grow.

I’ve cared about contributor onboarding ever since. I started the Intro to Sprints workshop at PyCon because the sprints were a wonderful place to join the Python community, but only if you could figure out where to sit, what to work on, and how to ask for help. A good onboarding process should help people make an initial contribution, but it should also help them build the knowledge and relationships they need to become leaders.

At the same time, you can’t build a welcoming contributor community by asking already-overwhelmed maintainers to do more and more work. I co-founded PyCon’s Maintainers Summit because maintainers need community and support too. I talked about this relationship in Relationship Problems in Open Source. Newcomers need to know they have value even when they don’t know what to do yet. Maintainers need to know they have value even when they can’t review every pull request or answer every question. Both need to be able to ask for help, and both need relationships that can survive confusion and conflict.

That brings me to governance. I’ve spent much of the last several years helping open source communities think about who makes decisions, whose perspectives count, and how people can meaningfully participate. In 2019, I gave a PyCon talk about Python’s transition from a BDFL to a steering council, A New Era in Python Governance. Since then I’ve worked with projects navigating governance transitions, founding boards, conflict, and questions about how contributors move into leadership. I don’t think there is one governance model that every project should adopt. I do think people should be able to understand how decisions are made, have a real voice in decisions that affect them, and contest those decisions when the process fails them.

I’m really excited to bring these interests and skills to the pyOpenSci community and to learn from all of you as well!

Research, Open Source, and Effective Workflows

That community work is one half of how I got here. The other half is research.

I actually started in research, not software! I studied social psychology as an undergraduate and joined social neuroimaging labs out of college. That’s where I learned to code — informally, and poorly. (It was years before I learned about version control or unit tests! 😭)

I stayed connected to research after moving into software. For two years I edited the Open Science Collaboration Blog, where scientists wrote about reproducibility, transparency, and openness in research. I was also one of the analysts in Many Analysts, One Data Set, which asked dozens of teams to analyze the same dataset and made the resulting variation in methods and conclusions visible.

I also had the opportunity to work with the late Dr. Mel Chua on a study, Conceptual Mismatches: What FOSS At-Large might learn from the study of PyPI. That work looked at the conflicting assumptions that software developers and users make, using the Python Packaging Index as a case study. (Mel was an incredible person and a deeply insightful researcher. I highly recommend reading through their work, including their dissertation and their blog archives.)

Anyway! I’m excited to dive into research again, and I am particularly interested in questions around how AI is impacting our work, our communities, and our mental health. I think AI has tremendous potential for both good and ill, and whether it makes our lives better or worse depends on whether we can learn how to understand, communicate, and take responsibility for meeting our own and each other’s needs.

Jumping In

Okay, that got a bit heavy 😂 so let’s end this with some fun facts about me. I am a huge women’s soccer fan (go Spirit!) and I like to bake cakes which are shaped like things that are not cake. I have a tabby cat named Tybalt who some of you will probably see (she loves to Zoom-bomb my meetings). She lives with me in Washington, DC.

If you want to say hi — in Slack, on GitHub, or anywhere else pyOpenSci gathers — please do. I’m glad to be here, and I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you.