Forwards Team Meeting (EMEA) 27 October 2023

Team co-leads: Heather Turner, Kevin O'Brien

Team members:

Minutes

The Google Summer of Code project converting R Journal articles to HTML, mentored by Di Cook and others, went well. HTML versions of all R Journal articles should be online by the end of the year.
- Di Cook and HT submitted an R Consortium proposal to fund someone to work on adding alt text to the figures.
At the R Project Sprint, Jonathan Godfrey collaborated with participants on a couple of accessibility issues, now in BrailleR on CRAN:
- Work with Deepayan Sarkar led to improvement in the ability to extract content of graphics devices. See summary.recordedplot
- Work with Gabe led to a working solution to extract recent console output. See the ShowMe(), SessionLog(), and GrabLast() functions.
HT and Jonathan Godfrey tested accessibility of webR after the sprint and passed on feedback to George Stagg.

HT will be presenting at Oxford R User Group, Oct 31 on sustainability and EDI in the R Project (summarising work of R Contribution Working Group and reporting back on R Project Sprint). Will give a similar talk at II Conference of R in Barcelona Nov 15-17.
KO looking at options to reboot LondonR. Maybe DublinR too. Has more support from employer to work on R related activities.
KO starting up monthly community call for user groups
- First monday of the month at 19.00 hours UTC. For other time zones, we can go at 07.00 hours UTC
- Find on global R meetup: https://www.meetup.com/globalr/
Discussed options for social media: do we want LinkedIn?
- Can boost a lot of related stuff on LinkedIn
- Mouna Belaid and Simisani Ndaba do this well
Not clear what is happening with R Consortium EDI working group
KO: A lot of potential around R in relation to Sustainable Development Goals
Ella Kaye has been working on a buddy scheme for RainbowR which she hopes to launch at the next meeting in November/December.

Ghana conference in March 24 (https://ghana-rusers.org/r-conference-2024/). KO is an invited speaker.
LatinR: Di Cook gave a keynote. Pao Corrales gave a lightning talk on contributing translations to R and co-organized a translation space during the conference (https://twitter.com/LatinR_Conf/status/1715373204942750049; https://x.com/LuisDVerde/status/1715390806884831288?s=20).
- Plans to be online next year and in person the year after.
useR! 2024
- Will be hybrid, but not sure what form that will take.
- Julie Josse is on programme committee
- KO and HT planning to be there.
posit:conf(2023)
- Was a good meeting place for R-Ladies
- posit:conf(2024) is in August next year

HT: R Project Sprint 31 Aug- 1 Sep went well. R Core members were very engaged and mixed well with participants. Most participants were able to make meaningful contributions during the sprint and some have continued to be active afterwards. Plan to write report for R Journal with further details.