e-Rum2020 CovidR Contest

CovidR is an e-Rum2020 pre-conference event featuring a contest of R contributions around the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contributions can be submitted until May 22nd, and the online e-Rum2020 pre-conference event will be held online on May 29th. Selected contributors will be invited to present their work to the community at the event, where the CovidR contest winner(s) will be announced and will receive their e-prizes. Finally, the best overall contribution will also be invited to present at the main e-Rum2020 conference (June 17th-20th).

Attendance to the event is for free, and tickets are available until May 22nd. Additional information on how to access the event will be provided to all ticket holders closer to the event.

Philosophy

The contest in the right context — Due to the relevance of the topic, we would like to clarify some points so that both the participants and their audience correctly engage with the CovidR contest.

The COVID-19 data assets made available by authoritative institutions are immensely useful. However, their incompleteness and differences in collection policies may open up to misunderstanding and miscommunication. Data scientists should force themselves to be responsible data narrators and communicators. To what extent can Rstats be a tool for data narrative? Can we use our tools to uncover missing data and data wrong-doing? A beautiful visualization is not necessarily about beautiful data, but it’s beautiful when it allows people to understand what we know as well as (more often) what we actually do not.

The CovidR contest is mostly about R analytics technicalities and for data geeks, but it’s open to data scientists, analysts, academics and researchers that may use the single simplest R function, but just on the right question, at the right time, tackling the many doubts cast by this so vast paradigmatic change we’re all living. Being original in the contest means being able to address different aspects of the pandemic. The CovidR contest is looking for such excellence and originality and we will also judge how R analytics can be an efficient and valid technical service to this effort and in such a context.

How to participate

• Provide us with your contribution by May 22nd using the GitHub repository, following the instructions in the ‘Submit’ section.
• A GitHub account is needed in order to submit a contribution.

What you will get

• All contributions will be featured in the CovidR Gallery website, allowing the community to browse through and vote for your contribution.
• Each participant will get a CovidR badge to include in their repository.
• We will share contributions on our social media.
• Selected contributions will be presented at the e-Rum2020 pre-conference event on May 29th.
• Winner(s) will be awarded with e-prizes.
• The ultimate contest winner will be invited to present at e-Rum2020.

How to win

An internal jury will pick the winner(s) by evaluating:

• technical quality of the work – i.e. interesting, innovative and best-practice usage of the R language;
• popularity of the work among the community – based on thumbs up in the CovidR Gallery.

The winner(s) will be announced during the pre-conference event on May 29th.

Participation rules

• Any work or analysis must be performed starting from official data (governmental, institutional, national or international), providing complete reference to sources.
• Data used can directly refer to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak (official number of cases, tests performed, viral genome sequences, …) or to different metrics that can affect the course of the infection if put in the context of the outbreak (demography, population density, census, geographic distributions, movements, …).
• Work can refer to a single specific country, a group of countries or the whole globe.
• Work or analyses must wholly or at least for a relevant part rely on R-based analytics.
• Data and source code must be open sourced and available through an open repository.
• Work can be of any kind, from original data analyses, models, to interactive dashboards or infographics.

If you have general questions you can always contact us at covidrcontest@erum.io, otherwise we recommend using the Issue / Pull Request submission mechanism as a channel for discussing how you can submit your contribution.

Submit a contribution

Each participant is requested to provide the following information in YAML format, which will allow the contribution to be integrated and be visible in the CovidR Gallery

# Contribution's title, author, abstract
title: An Awesome COVID-19 Contribution # title case
author: An Author, Another Author # comma-separated
abstract: |
  Provide a short abstract with a brief description of your contribution and its
  main features (max 800 characters, including spaces). The usage of publicly
  available data should be explictly mentioned.
  The text can be broken across multiple lines, each indented with two spaces.

# Short name to be used in the website Gallery menu (can be the same as title)
menu_entry: Short title
# URL of the public source code repository
repository: https://github.com/user/repo
# Type of contribution and how it can be featured as gallery content
# Keep only the type and content relevant to your contribution
# For a Shiny app, provide its URL:
type: shiny
content: https://user.shinyapps.io/my-app # e.g. my-app on shinyapps.io
# For a general online-published resource (e.g. a website / report):
type: webpage
content: https://user.github.io/my-analysis # URL of the webpage
# For more complex / heterogeneous contributions, you can create a GitHub
# Gist (https://gist.github.com/) with the relevant information and pointers:
type: gist
content: <script...> # place here what you get from the "Embed" button

If you are not sure about some of the fields, we encourage you to still open a Pull Request or a New Issue as described below, as part of which we will discuss and take care of the remaining details.

How to submit

You can submit your contribution until May 22nd using one of the following methods

1. Pull Request
   • Fork the repository and create a new .yml file under contest/contributions, containing the information above for your contribution.
     • The example above is available as .example.yml and can be used as a starting point.
     • The file-name should somehow identify your contribution, we recommend using something like name-short-title.yml.
   • Create a Pull Request, making sure you “Allow edits from maintainers”.
   • Send us an email at covidrcontest@erum.io with the link to the Pull Request.
   • You can also preview the integration of your contribution in the CovidR Gallery from a local clone of your fork via
     • remotes::install_deps()
     • browseURL(file.path("contest", rmarkdown::render_site("contest")))
2. Create an Issue
   • Submit the contribution as new Issue to provide the required information.
   • We will follow up by creating the relevant .yml file and corresponding pull request.
   • Send us an email at covidrcontest@erum.io with the link to the Issue.

Your submission will be officially accepted once the corresponding Pull Request is reviewed, approved, and merged. Your contribution will then appear in the CovidR Gallery.

We have prepared a video tutorial illustrating the submission process described above.

If you have any problems you can also contact us at: covidrcontest@erum.io.

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Code of Conduct

This project is governed by e-Rum2020 Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.

This code of conduct is adapted from the ESO workshop & conference code of conduct, which was derived from original Creative Commons documents by PyCon and Geek Feminism. It is released under a CC-0 license for reuse.