Present: Heather Turner (HT), Noa Tamir (NT), Lorna Maria (LM), Angela Li (AL), Kevin O'Brien (KO)
Absent: Tania Allard (TA), Jenny Bryan (JB), Emily Dodwell (ED), Jonathan Godfrey (JG), Isabella Gollini (IG), Julie Josse (JJ), Tanja Kecojevic (TK), Michael Lawrence (ML), Augustina Ragwitz (AR)
Present: Nujcharee Haswell (NH), Nic Crane (NC)
Absent: Di Cook (DC), Madlene Hamilton (MH), Nujcharee Haswell (NH), Liz Kellogg (LK), Joslynn Lee (JL), David Meza (DM), Ileena Mitra (IM), Ritwik Mitra (RM), Wenfeng Qin (WQ), Joyce Robbins (JR), David Smith (DS), Charlotte Wickham (CW), Yizhe Xu (YX)
- (HT) Should we make our GitHub projects public?
- Pros: easier to see what each team is working on, can add issues from other repos, not just the tasks repo.
- Cons: not sure what happens about private repos. Discuss on #core
- (HT) Shall we skip the core team meeting in August and have team meetings instead? Might help for teams to get to know each other better and make plans for year. Discuss in #core.
- (HT) Welcome to new members:
- Richard Ngamita (community)
- Emma Rand (teaching)
- Jesse Mostipak (conferences)
- Florencia Mangini (undecided)
- Zhian N. Kamvar, (on ramps)
- Lorna Maria Aine (social media, blog co-ordinator)
- Damiano Cerasuolo (community)
- Nic Crane (community)
- Shakyrah Nakalungi (social media, co-lead)
- In the process of on-boarding
- Liz Kane (conferences, accessibility advisor)
- Waiting to hear back from:
- Sebastián Díaz, who responded to the link to the Forwards survey to ask to join the survey team.
- (HT) Please add here any R-related events you have coming up - are you going to a conference, giving a tutorial or giving a keynote talk? (Meetup talks are probably too detailed, but perhaps mention if doing this specifically as outreach, e.g. Kevin if you are doing any remote talks for groups in under-served regions)
ACTIONS
- Update news of relevant events Forwards members are involved in on website; publicise on social media when relevant (JR, SN)
- Update [Profile on Slack[(https://rforwards.slack.com/archives/C3XD6925A/p1563530864048300) (ALL)
- Update About page and Gmail lists with new members (ED)
- Update Twitter list (ED)
- (KO): Focus of community team is on supporting under-represented groups in R community, including:
- Trans Community, including attendance at Trans*code to learn more about how trans members of the tech community interact with the rest of the tech world, and the types of problems they typically encounter.
- Rainbow R / RLGBTQ
- (NC): Discussion at useR! about organising RainbowR (+ allies) drinks meetups at conferences. I will look into was acquiring sponsorship for such events.
- Afrotech Fest: Events in London showcased the work of techies from BAME backgrounds. This event inspired initiation of the Africa R project.
- Collaboration with/learning from related software communities, particularly Python and Julia
- Outreach to Native American community
- (HT) Support code of conduct implementation at R@IISA. Discuss on #conferences
- (HT) I have gathered the input from LH and started an update of our event best practices, focusing on inclusion of people with disabilities and visual impairments in particular. To help us discuss and develop this further, I have created a pull request here and an associated task here. I have invited various folk to review the pull request to get the discussion going. If anyone is interested, join the discussion in #conferences.
- (HT) TK has moved the diversity application form for useR! 2019 to the R Foundation LimeSurvey instance, so that can be used for the applications next year.
- (KO) Possibility of satRdays NYC and/or Arizona/New Mexico regions?
ACTIONS
- Advice R@IISA on CoC implementation (NT, JM)
- Contribute to update to event best practices (JG, KO, NT, JJ, AL, JM, TA, LH)
(No items at this time.)
- (LM) Creation of a blog schedule (a board or GitHub) to keep the blog active so the blog team can work on upcoming blogs in time.
- I suggest we consider 2-3 blogs a month, which can be scheduled at the start of each month.
- HT started a GitHub project board to make the scheduling effective. Alternatively, let me know if there are any slack apps good for this.
- Blog topics priority: Technical Projects with various R user groups, Events and News, Community Info and guidelines - Discuss on #social media.
- (HT) Please publicise the Forwards useR! survey, e.g. by re-tweeting this tweet. Publicising on LinkedIn, Facebook and other ways also welcome, but note this survey is only for people that attended useR! 2019. See note on slack for more information about survey distribution.
- (HT) For anyone that wants to add content to the useR! website, I have added some starter notes in #random.
- (HT) Please post suggestions for things to share on Forwards social media channels in the #social-media-tips channel (this is an on-going task).
ACTIONS
- Suggest ideas for blogs on #social-media, or by DM to LM (ALL). See list of ideas started on slack.
- Share link to useR! 2019 survey (ALL)
- Test adding content to Forwards website (LM, SN, ZK, TK, NH, anyone else interested!)
- Add tips on #social-media-tips (ALL)
- (HT) Comments about useR! 2019 survey:
- useR! survey does not consider non-participants and the reasons they did not attend, which can be addressed next year
- There is interest in surveying the R community at large. We do not have the resources for this. However the R Consortium did run a survey a couple of years ago and did ask us for input at the time: https://www.r-consortium.org/blog/2017/06/29/take-the-r-consortiums-survey-on-r. They translated it into Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish, to capture more of the population of users.
- We can potentially access the data for this survey and we have had an open issue to at least include some of the summaries from this on our website.
ACTIONS
- Import diversity scholarship form to R Foundation LimeSurvey (TK).
- Make a list of tasks for useR! 2019 survey result on GitHub (NH).
- Recruit additional survey team members to take on integration of R Consortium survey summaries on website. (Note: If anyone wants to call for or get involved in a future community survey, it would be best to go through the R Consortium Diversity and Inclusion working group.)
- (HT) Software Carpentry are looking for feedback on their Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility roadmap. There is a 5 page easy-read version and a 15 page full version (PDF).
- As well as potentially giving feedback there may be things the teaching team could adopt in the short/long term. Read and discuss at later teaching team meeting?
- Also relevant to community team and on-ramps team.
ACTIONS
- Finish blog post on workshops (AL, IG): Need additions from Chicago, Budapest workshops
- Next slackathon will be in September. Vote for your preferred weekend via the survey in Slack.