Maintaining a package can be a lonesome activity, which sometimes poses a problem if you prefer team work or if you encounter a very thorny-for-you problem.Beside belonging to a supportive community of maintainers (like rOpenSci 😉), for collaborative help and commiseration you can try to build a community of contributors around your package!In this post, we’ll explore one tool helping you towards that goal: “help wanted” issues, with which your

We are pleased to open the call for the second cohort of Champions and Mentors for the rOpenSci Champions Program 🎉 ! This program will continue to support our goal of identifying, recognizing, and rewarding passionate community members who help the community grow and improve.

rOpenSci is seeking mentors to support our inaugural cohort of rOpenSci Champions! The rOpenSci Champions Program is for people from historically and systematically excluded groups who are interested in contributing to rOpenSci and the broader ecosystem of open source and open science communities.

The rOpenSci suite of packages is mainly composed of packages contributed by the community through peer-review, but also includes some packages maintained by staff.Over time, the commitments and availability of the original developers of a package can change. This leads to some maintainers stepping down from their maintainer role, or other maintainers looking to lower their workload through more teamwork and therefore looking for co-maintainers.

Why a Champions Program? Champion programs are designed to identify, recognize, and reward passionate community members. At rOpenSci, we recognize that there is a dismaying lack of diversity in the ecosystem of research software and open source communities. The R Community is no exception; its developers are overwhelmingly white, male, and from a handful of countries.

This blog post is intended to help you get started in rOpenSci community by highlighting some key links and activities. If you have questions, please get in touch with our Community Manager, Yanina Bellini Saibene by email or schedule a meeting. We are here for you as you begin your journey with our community. Welcome!Where do I get started? Glad you asked!

At their closing keynote at the 2020 RStudio Conference, Hilary Parker and Roger Peng mentioned that they hatched the idea for their excellent Not So Standard Deviations podcast following their reunion at the 2015 rOpenSci unconf, (“runconf15”). That statement went straight to my heart because it pin-pointed how I had been feeling throughout the week of RStudio Conference that I had been unable to name.

While many people groan at the thought of participating in a group ice breaker activity, we’ve gotten consistent feedback from people who have been to recent rOpenSci unconferences. We’ve had lots of requests for a detailed description of how we do it. This post shares our recipe, including a script you can adapt, a reflection on its success, examples of how others have used it, and some tips to remember.

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.