Present: Heather Turner (HT), Isabella Gollini, Emily Dodwell (ED), Tanja Kecojevic (TK), Kevin O'Brien (KO)
Absent: Jenny Bryan (JB), Di Cook (DC), Jasmine Dumas (JD), Jonathan Godfrey (JG), Julie Josse (JJ), Michael Lawrence (ML), Augustina Ragwitz (AR), David Smith (DS), Tania Allard (TA),
Present: Angela Li (AL), Joyce Robbins (JR)
Absent: Stella Bollmann (SB), Carolin Strobl (CS), Rudolf Debelak (RD), Andrea Foulkes (AF), John Fox (JF), Gina Griffin (GG), Madlene Hamilton (MH), Liz Kellogg (LK), Joslynn Lee (JL), David Meza (DM), Gina Merchant (GM), Ileena Mitra (IM), Wenfeng Qin (WQ), Joyce Robbins (JR), Maëlle Salmon (MS), Tracy Shen (TS), Noa Tamir (NT), Charlotte Wickham (CW), Hadley Wickham (HW), Yizhe Xu (YX)
- HT: The R Foundation (RF) reviewed our Code of Conduct (CoC) policy recommendations and were generally positive about the updated CoC, but less sure about the recommendations for RF oversight. JJ and I prepareda second draft of the CoC in response to their feedback and proposed that as a first step, the RF:
- Adopt the re-draft as the standard CoC and publish it on the R project website.
- Provide guidelines for conference organizers on how to implement the CoC.
- Record a high-level summary of any CoC violations and review on a yearly basis. These three points fulfill both our original recommendations on the CoC and one of the three recommendations on RF oversight. The RF will vote on this in the General Assembly which will happen electronically before the end of the year. The guidelines will be subject to further review and it is not yet decided whether they will be made public, but this was not an issue Forwards had a strong view on in any case.
- HT: I've added some inclusive bathroom signs (one gender neutral, one modern accessible) to the workshops repo. Please consider using at your events!
- Angela Li is joining from RLadies Chicago with the mission of leading a women's package workshop in Chicago in the spring. From Angela: "I'm the founder of the R-Ladies Chicago Meetup and I've noticed that while women in my community are often comfortable using other folks' tools, many of them haven't contributed back to open source. So I figured that a package workshop in the spring (March or so) would be a good thing. I'm also interested in building out materials to onboard new instructors, empowering more R-Ladies organizers to lead package workshops for their groups. I think there's a lot of potential with partnering with R-Ladies in terms of spreading the reach of the work Forwards does, especially in creating avenues for R-Ladies to build and develop software."
- HT: We have about a month if we want to contribute an article for the R Journal Forwards column. Unfortunately there hasn't been much activity on the survey/data front, so it seems best to aim for an article on the teaching, where we have been very active this year.
- Four weeks from now (so December 14th) would give them time to copy-edit it and give feedback. Our first article was similar to an R Journal article, but it's not peer-reviewed, so it can be more informal. Perhaps something along the lines of this R Day report, with some photos of some of the events? https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2018-1/rday.pdf
ACTIONS
- DC and IG to collaborate on article for R Journal Forwards column.
- HT: We are co-hosting a datathon with Rainbow R and the Cardiff R User Group, that ties in with the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The main event is in Cardiff on Saturday November 17, but people will continue to contribute afterwards, in particular some folk in Washington DC. We are organising our work on the Rainbow R GitHub: https://github.com/rlgbtq/TDoR2018
- KO: Article link: "Why Women Are Flourishing in R Community but Lagging in Python"
ACTIONS
- Remote contributions to the TDoR datathon welcome (ALL)
- HT: We have been busy gathering a committee to evaluate the diversity scholarship applications for useR! 2019. In the end we have 10 people on the team, 4 people from Forwards and the others mainly from R-Ladies. Details should be put on the website in mid-December - applications are set to open December 17. JJ will chair the committee.
ACTIONS
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- TK will return to useR! 2018 survey analysis.
- TK: The klikR initiative I started last September here in Belgrade is going well:
- I’ll be delivering another workshop next Saturday in a town in north of Serbia.
- I have adopted (as @heather suggested) some of Forwards ‘lernR’ slides that I ran simultaneously with the ‘xaringan’ presentation and a script file that the students were working on (http://klikr.rbind.io).
- Also, last month I ran a workshop in Manchester at Northwest Universities R Day conference – the workshop covered building websites using ‘blogdown’ (https://github.com/DataTeka/NWUnisRDay). The workshop went well and to my mind it could be interesting to offer it as a part of R Forwards teaching as more people want to setup their own websites and start blogging about their rstats work and experience.
- HT: It would be helpful to have TK's slides added to the GitHub repo.
- HT: We should work out what workshops should come under the Forwards umbrella:
- Generally this would be R workshops that develop core programming skills from beginner to advanced. I agree blogdown can be included here as it helps to raise an individual's profile as an R programmer and build an online portfolio useful for demonstrating their skills.
- So if you are willing to share such a workshop for use by Forwards members/others to outreach to under-represented groups it can go in the workshops repo. Please describe it in the README. It would be good to add our workshops to https://github.com/rstudio-education/rstats-ed as well.
- HT: I have a small amount of money left over from the money that the R Consortium sent to me to pay out the scholarship grants for eRum (~USD 69.17 sitting in a USD account). I could send back to R Consortium, but maybe easiest to send where needed. Are there remaining expenses from either the US or AUS girls workshops?
- IG: I am planning to have the Girls workshop in Dublin next spring, and the Women package development workshop at the start of the new year (organised with RLadies Dublin).
- ED: Update NYC girls workshop that JR and I ran We had 4 adult volunteers (2 R Ladies and 2 of my AT&T colleagues) and 16 very motivated high school girls who worked well together and diligently tackled an introduction to R, plots in ggplot2, Markdown, and manipulating data with dplyr. Lunch groups were breakout discussions about careers in data science, and the afternoon was a hackathon during which each pair of students chose 1 of 3 data sets (NYC Flights, Taxis, and CitiBike) to focus on, culminating in a 3-5 minute presentation of a few visualizations that captured interesting behavior or answered questions they formulated. Joyce tweeted some pictures: https://twitter.com/jtrnyc/status/1056308167590711296
- DC: I postponed the Brisbane girls workshop. I need to make adjustments to the news page. It will likely be re-scheduled for March. You saw how it max’d out very quickly. When I opened up more places, some people dropped out. And in the last few days before the workshop numbers dropped to 7. I just didn’t feel like it warranted going to Brisbane for such small numbers. It seems like the people who max’d out the slots did so without looking at their calendars, to be sure to have a spot. We are thinking that we will charge a $20 fee on reservation next time to try prevent this. And then refund the money when they come.
ACTIONS
- Add the appropriate licenses to NYC Girls Workshop materials so they can be added to and organized within GitHub. (ED and JR)
- A draft "getting started" document for future organizers that includes DC's helpful notes from our meeting at JSM. Any feedback that makes that more relevant will be most welcome. (ED)
- Next slackathon will be in January. Vote for your preferred weekend via the survey in Slack: https://rforwards.slack.com/archives/C3XD6925A/p1542374428002300