Present: Heather Turner, Emma Rand, Samantha Toet, Ritwik Mitra, Claudia Huaylla, Emily Dodwell, gwynn sturdevant, Liz Hare, Zane Dax
gwynn is organizing R trivia - maybe can use questions from useR! trivia session, Heather will check who ran it!
Heather Turner - R Contribution Working Group
- Original goal of Forwards
- First kick off meeting enabled people to speak to issues of diversity, inclusion, and barriers to contributions
- Results: R Dev Guide https://forwards.github.io/rdevguide/ (inspired by Python developer guide) to provide user-friendly introduction to contributions (identifying bug, introducing patch, working with R Core Members on other projects)
- Saranjeet was funded by R Foundation to provide first draft (March-June); presented at useR! 2021
- Hope to get a few more people to read it and get feedback (initial feedback from members of working group)
- useR! has been going since 2004 but never tutorial on how to contribute
- Two at useR! 2021: how to contribute to R general, how to contribute translations (recordings available for both)
- Back in idea generation phase to think about what to work on next year
- Happy to have people propose ideas even if not available to contribute much time to working on it (https://github.com/forwards/rcontribution/blob/master/ideas_incubator.md)
- Comments and questions -- questions on slack (https://forwards.github.io/rcontribution/slack), next working group meeting in September
Emma Rand - Teaching Team news: Package dev workshops
- Lecturer in biology department at University of York (computational biologist by training)
- Teaching team colead
- Coincided with COVID -- thought about making workshops more accessible (1-2 day workshops didn't work for everyone due to travel, childcare). How to access more training in bits? Modules are ~1 hour long and trying to specify learning objective and pre-reqs so people can identify what will be most useful for them.
- Still working on -- delivering package workshop again in September (with Mine)
- If interested in helping out, get in touch with Emma or Mine
- Q: Advertised on Forwards twitter?
Liz Hare
- Works on genetics and general statistics -- working dog programs focusing on health and behavior
- Accessibility advisor to forwards; also working with useR! 2021 organizing committee and MiR (Minorities in R)
- Project with Sylvia (last name) looking at use (or lack thereof) of alt text in TidyTuesday submissions -- talk about good things to include in alt text for data visualizations
- Will post talk and slides from GitHub
- (here's the link to the GitHub repo about alt-text: https://github.com/spcanelon/csvConf2021)
- Plan for more educational programming for people interested in data viz for accessbility mostly for low vision and blind people to make visualizations better for people and a bit about alt text
- useR! 2021: Diversity team encompassed accessibility, but worked with organizers across programming. Accessibility: can someone using screen reader use website, are ads on social media accessible and have descriptions for cute marmots (theme of conference), can people get through registration and payment
- Inclusion: how to make people welcome and remove barriers so dont' have to ask us to do so. Ways disability and accessibility are discussed. Bring to community: if apply to give a talk, agree to follow accessibility guidelines (some did, some didn't).
- Big to have them check off a box of awareness.
- xaringan markdown template for slides to increase likelihood that slides would be more accessible (much more than .pdf and Google slides)
- Hope that people carry forward into their R communities
Zane Dax
- Part of MiR
- Enjoyed working on GitHub repo for Forwards
- Designed Forwards shirt (will add alt text to image description)
- HT: We have a branding repo in GitHub
- Idea at one point for general xaringan theme (nothing really came from that)
- ER: Module templates from teaching
- Bachelors in Public Health
- Lots of time to work on things -- using R for 3 months now
- Just finished Bechdel Wallace test project for StarTrek
Samantha Toet - the R-Consortium Diversity & Inclusion Project
- Work at RStudio on Partnerships team, and involved in community (R-Ladies, etc.) for awhile
- Involved with RStudio Diversity scholarships and conference
- On infrastructure steering committee on R Consortium and Chair of Diversity and Inclusion Project
- What we've been up to and how to get folks involved (slides on R Consortium Diversity and Inclusion Project):
- Charter statement: want people to feel comfortable going to R Consortium and community events and participate as fully as possible
- Weave diversity and inclusion and accessibility into events
- 4 big projects: Guide to writing a code of conduct, organizer checklist, speaker directory and recruitment, speaker recommendation
- Want conference organizers to consider everything (all aspects of making conference inclusive)that goes into making CoC, esp in state of COVID and remote events
- Checklist: anything from virtual meetup to conference, anyone on team is encouraged to meet with organizers to discuss codes of conduct
- Speaker directory and recruitment: avoid all same keynote speakers and manels; tips on how to elevate people to become keynote speakers, topics beyond standard R conference and how to support/identify speakers to make inclusive
- Way to recommend speakers
- How to get involved:
- Membership and leadership roles (CoC, community global engagement, speakers directory, marketing)
- Community amplification
- Participate in the R Consortium Speakers Bureau
- Adopt and Contribute to our CoC guide
- Host your own R Community Events
- Here's the RCDI repo: https://github.com/RConsortium/RCDI-WG
Ritwik Mitra
- ML Research scientist
- Recently changed job so not as involved as previously -- part of teaching team
- Previously involved with teaching student workshops; would love to get involved again if similar workshops created
Claudia Huaylla- I will introduce myself and tell what I am doing now.
- From Argentina; assistant professor at University
- Work about analysis of ecological network
- On survey team -- last year with Paola working on LatAm survey, presented results at useR! 2021 on using R in Latin America and difficulties
- Two weeks ago, sent abstract to Latin R Conference -- waiting on response, interested to see how participants responded to survey
- This year, would like to help in any area where may be needed
- HT: Suggest writing up results from useR! on Forwards blog (not sure we've had any posts this year, so would be nice to get this going again) to share what found from survey
- R Journal has been asking us to write news update each issue
- Just published one, next wouldn't be until next year
- Could think about Spanish translations in the future
Present: Di Cook, Emily Dodwell, Maria Prokofieva, Pao Corrales, Jonathan Godfrey, gwynn sturdevant
Emily Dodwell
- Former researcher at AT&T Labs; joined Forwards in 2016 while Simon Urbanek was colleague
- Serve as administrator and on teaching team -- previously worked with Joyce Robbins and Ritwik Mitra on high school girls workshop
- Lead organizer of R-Ladies NYC since 2019
gwynn sturdevant
- Writing an article about nonvisual ways of communicating data (includes virtual reality component) -- about lack of accessibility for data
- R is community that really values diversity -- trying to leverage that to centralize technologies into R community
- Di suggestion to gear towards Journal of Computational Graphical statistics (JCGS); Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (SADM); Journal of Data Science, Statisics and Visualization (JDSSV)
- Some conversation of paper intro and where it could be published -- pitch as opening round of conversation
- Get feedback from people like Susan Vanderplas, Carson Sievert, Barret S, Amanda Cox (nytimes)
Paola Corrales
- From Argentina -- R user since 2014
- Weather scientist -- now doing PhD to predict severe weather forecasts
- Enjoy teaching -- teaching R since last year and developed materials in Spanish (also for climate and weather)
- Now teaching data visualization
- Part of Forwards survey team -- joined last year and worked on Latin America R Users survey
- Trying to organize team to analyze all data from survey -- presented results at useR! 2021 conference, sent proposal to Latin R conference (November)
- Working on how to anonymize the data and open door to help other people work on too
- Also help with useR! conference with some activities -- code of conduct team, diversity and satisfaction survey
Jonathan Godfrey
- Original S+ user during completion of PhD and Minitab (lack of accessibility in latter) -- came to R community, but no other blind people at that time using R (no usable networks for reaching each other), so trial and error
- Figured out screen reading software to best interact with R
- Found email list running out of USA of blind people in USA in mathematics (not as many statisticians)
- First blind person to get a job as lecturer in statistics (no way to find out who was out there to ask questions of)
- Very pleased today that now when people talk about the blind person using R, not just me!
- A research collaboration with Theo and submitted to JSS -- couldn't evaluate findings at the time because no "peers" for review
- Involvement with Forwards started around time of submission to R Journal when met Heather; attended useR! 2014 which started conversations about how blind person would manage
- Opportunities to diversity journal editors (where amount of energy required ...)
- Discussion about social inequality of women still do majority of household/childcare
- What can Forwards try and promote that may have greater chance of longterm benefit, e.g. Google summer of Code (supervising was beneficial -- helps get people to start writing packages)
Di Cook
- Professor at Monash University in Melbourne
- Got involved at Forwards in 2014/2015 when first put together: set up email address, website, brainstormed the name
- Then got involved with editing journals so still lurking
- Would like to keep involved when things lighten up to stay active
- Important for R community to have Forwards organization
- Anything I can help with improving diversity generally, that's a reason to remain involved -- maybe there are things at senior level where I can help make them happen
- Forwards column in R Journal: visibility, communicating to R community with broad visibility
- Involved in survey analysis early on as well -- motivation regularly with useR was measurement of community (based on previous work predicting gender based on name to predict number of packages written by women)
- Extended to consider authorship in other journals -- proportion of community that is female minority -- contentious activity because not appropriate to impose person's gender based on name
- More appropriate thing to do is collect data via surveys, where people can identify preferred gender identity
- As community, don't have good and regular comprehensive measure of how well we are doing in that general R package deliveries and publishing
- Important because factor in getting people promoted
- Surveys are great but nonresponse is an issue for accurately measuring diversity of community
Maria Prokofieva
- At Victoria University in Melbourne
- Been with R community for more than 5 years
- Finance -- working group for R Consortium -- develop packages and create educational materials for business data scientists and accountants
- Promote tools
- Run zoom chats that have been successful
- Task view for auditing and accounting task -- relating all available packages to regular jobs in accounting (huge area for development)
- Trying to incorporate all tools into business analytics classes (despite friction from department)
- Develop workshops