We are excited to welcome Beatriz Milz and Margaret Siple to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review.They join Laura DeCicco, Julia Gustavsen, Anna Krystalli, Mauro Lepore, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, Emily Riederer, Adam Sparks, and Jeff Hollister.rOpenSci has been running a rigorous and collegial software peer review system since 2015.Editors manage the review process, performing initial package checks, identifying

We are excited to welcome Emily Riederer, Adam Sparks, and Jeff Hollister to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review.They join Laura DeCicco, Julia Gustavsen, Anna Krystalli, Mauro Lepore, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, and Melina Vidoni.

We are pleased to welcome Laura DeCicco, Julia Gustavsen, and Mauro Lepore to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review.They join Brooke Anderson, Anna Krystalli, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, and Melina Vidoni.Lincoln Mullen and Scott Chamberlain are now board alumni.

We are pleased to welcome Brooke Anderson and Melina Vidoni to our team of Associate Editors for rOpenSci Software Peer Review. They join Scott Chamberlain, Anna Krystalli, Lincoln Mullen, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross and Maëlle Salmon. With the addition of Brooke and Melina, our editorial board now includes four women and four men, located in North America, South America and Europe.

Part of rOpenSci’s mission is to create technical infrastructure in the form of carefully vetted R software tools that lower barriers to working with data sources on the web. Our open peer software review system for community-contributed tools is a key component of this. As the rOpenSci community grows and more package authors submit their work for peer review, we need to expand our editorial board to maintain a speedy process.

I’ve raved about the value of extending a personalized welcome to new community members and I recently shared six tips for running a successful hackathon-flavoured unconference. Building on these, I’d like to share the specific approach and (free!) tools I used to help prepare new rOpenSci community members to be productive at our unconference.

In May 2017, I helped run a wildly successful “unconference” that had a huge positive impact on the community I serve.

A growing community of scientists from a variety of disciplines is moving the norms of scientific research toward open practices. Supporters of open science hope to increase the quality and efficiency of research by enabling the widespread sharing of datasets, research software source code, publications, and other processes and products of research.

In my training as a AAAS Community Engagement Fellow, I hear repeatedly about the value of extending a personal welcome to your community members. This seems intuitive, but recently I put this to the test. Let me tell you about my experience creating and maintaining a #welcome channel in a community Slack group.

Next week I’ll be in Washington DC to meet my peers in research community management as part of the inaugural class of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program! The program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has a mission to improve community building and collaboration in scientific organizations and research collaborations by providing a year of training and support to a cohort of scientific community managers.