Project 3 - Two Years of Writing, Speaking, and Teaching with the rOpenSci Community

Picture by Ana Tavares on Unsplash

One of the core competencies of a Community Manager is Communication. The third “project” I will tell you about is not a project per se but a series of activities related to communication and outreach. 

The tasks involve content creation and curation, editorial, speaking, and presenting to share and discuss the community’s work, content, and outcomes in front of diverse audiences in a variety of settings and strategic engagement with external audiences to disseminate knowledge, communicate messages, and deliver projects and products.

Blog post

Blog posts are one of the most important forms of content creation and curation within communication activities. My tasks include writing articles for the rOpenSci blog and finding, inviting, and supporting community members to write for our blog.

rOpenSci has a guide for authors and editors that outlines all the considerations and steps for writing an article for our blog. This guide is shared with everyone who will write for our blog.

We also have an editorial team that proposes topics and potential authors and decides on the proposals we receive. Steffi LaZerte, Maëlle Salmon, Mark Padgham and I are part of that team. We discuss these issues in a closed Slack channel. We have a GitHub project to keep track of all the articles, their status, authors, potential publish dates, and the people who will review them. It is a very useful tool for organizing the work. Steffi also does editorial work on each article, and the rest of the team edits when needed. I always edit the ones in Spanish.

Since I started, I have written 33 blog posts with 37 different co-authors and edited 22. 15 blog posts I wrote are multilingual. Some of these articles are published on other websites, such as the CSCCE and SSI. The R Weekly podcast has mentioned blog posts related to R package development.

My articles are about the projects I lead such as the champions program and translations, about specific community managers activities such as social media news and interviews to our members and tools for those who are part of our community related to community management and R package development.

rOpenSci also has a newsletter. If you are subscript and enjoy the content, Maëlle Salmon is the main responsible for curating the content, publishing, and making sure our newsletter is in your inbox every month.

The rest of the staff contributes to the HQ section, where we mention the most important news of the month about the projects we lead, along with content suggestions for the different sections of the newsletter. Since I joined rOpenSci, I have contributed to 26 newsletters.

Books, guides, and tip sheets.

One of my favorite things about rOpenSci is the culture of openness it preaches and practices. We document our processes and share them openly in books, guides, or tip sheets for other people and organizations.

In these two years, I have co-authored two books for the champions program: a Play Book on how to organize and run the program and the mentor guidelines for the people who will mentor our champions. I also co-wrote a localization and translation guide for our multilingual publishing project.

I also wrote case studies, quick and tip guides about how to participate in rOpenSci, how to start using Mastodon - wrote with my friend Alycia Crall - Virtual event accessibility guiding questions and Using GitHub to plan community calls for rOpenSci.

I contribute by updating or adding new content to existing guides and books, such as the rOpenSci Community Contributing Guide or the rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review.

Talks

Some community managers are the visible faces of the community, so part of our job is to give talks in different places and for different audiences. Like the blog posts, part of my job also involves proposing and supporting people in our community to give talks about rOpenSci (but we’ll talk about that in more detail in another blog post).

I enjoy giving talks, explaining what we do, and sharing what I have learned, so I will generally say yes to an invitation to give a talk. Especially if the event is online, it is very easy for me to participate. I also send proposals to events and conferences.

Since I became rOpenSci Community Manager, I have delivered 43 talks related to or representing rOpenSci. I shared the video and slides when available. Half of the talks were in Spanish, the other half in English.

Six of these talks have been keynotes for Women in Data Science La Plata 2022, Notebook Now!, CarpentryCon 2022, Reunión Argentina de Agrometerología 2022, AGRANDA 2022 and R Day Colombia 2023.

I participated in four podcasts: Embedded, Data Umbrella, Code4Thought and Sustain, speaking about the language barrier, volunteer participation, and global communities. 

I also present at events and conferences such as CSV,Conf,v7, LatinR 2022 and 2023, FOSSDEM 2024, CarpentryCon 2022, SER 2022 and 2024, and Toronto Data Workshop.

I got invitation to share about rOpenSci with working groups, committees, and boards of directors like Bioconductor, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia Agropecuaria, Euro-BioImaging, and Tampa Bay Estuary Program . I also participated as a speaker, panelist, or moderator in other community events, like CZI Open Science 2024, CS&S, CSCCE, The Carpentries, GitHub, R-Ladies Chapters, and R User Groups.

Training

Teaching is one of my favorite activities. As part of the Champions Program Project, I design and then deliver training on mentoring, R package development best practices, and community management skills.

I have had the chance to teach and assist in 22 workshops for rOpensci with talented members of our community: Maelle Salmon, Paola Corrales, Mauro Lepore, Heather Turner, and CSCCE staff. Open Life Science invited me to one of their training sessions to share about testing and coding styles. 

Conclusion

Writing, speaking, and teaching are important tasks for a community manager. Besides spreading news about the community, reaching new audiences, and being able to teach about the topics that interest the rOpenSci community, this activity allows us to know and learn more about our members, their activities, and how we can help them and other communities and collaboration possibilities.

My most significant change over the past two years has been feeling more confident about writing and giving a talk in English. I’m very proud that rOpenSci now offers multilingual content on its various communications channels, such as its webpage and Vimeo channel. Bring more people to the community by supporting them to write quality and useful content for rOpenSci and the R Community, in their native language, is one of the things that I have been enjoying the most.

I thank my co-workers at rOpenSci for their support, for reviewing my texts, for listening to my talks, and giving me feedback to improve. I’m grateful to my friends Greg Wilson and Athanasia Mo Mowinckel and my sister Alejandra Bellini, who are always willing to help me improve my texts and my talks and introduce me to people to share about what we are doing at rOpenSci.