Project 4 - Community Events

Program management and development are another set of core activities of a Community Manager. Programming, in this context, is the combination of activities in a community that supports members in realizing the community’s purpose together.

In this blog post, I share my work organizing events for rOpenSci.

Community Calls

Community Calls are one of the traditional rOpenSci types of events. We host regular one-hour online community calls that are free and open to all to discuss and learn about shared interests. Each event features two to five speakers, one moderator, and 20 to 40 minutes of Q&A time. We use collaborative note-taking, allowing participants to share ideas or resources and ask questions. All calls are recorded and available online. We add close captions and transcription and publish all the materials on our webpage.

The main goal of these calls is to strengthen connections between members of the rOpenSci community. They also inform people about technical and social topics, bring different stakeholders' perspectives to light, and identify unmet needs on a topic.

Generally, rOpenSci’s calls attract a global audience of R users and developers, with representation from academia, government, non-profit, and industry. Since the start, rOpenSci has hosted 40 Community Calls with 96 unique presenters and 900+ people from 50+ countries attended.

Community Calls are really engaging. People participate by speaking and writing. The collaborative documents become fantastic resources with questions and answers from the speaker and the rest of the participants.

How we organize community calls

We utilize a public repository on GitHub for crowdsourcing ideas using issues where members can comment or vote using emojis. We use labels to annotate the status of these issues to help engage in the discussion. The participatory process helps me prioritize topics and receive input and suggestions about potential speakers.

I also use issues in a private repo to organize the community calls. I created the issues with a template that generates a complete, detailed checklist with 71 items! This checklist lists all the necessary steps to organize the community call and includes links to all the required materials, such as the template for the shared document for the meeting, the presentation slide, and social media posts examples.

Phases of the organization

After selecting a topic from the public repo, I contact 1 to 3 speakers and 1 moderator and collaborate with them to finalize the topic details, title, target audience, and other details.

Next is the preparation phase. We select a date and time that suits both the speakers and the target audience, avoiding time slots that conflict with neighboring communities. The communication starts by announcing a “save the date” on social media and advertising the event across various platforms, such as Posit Community, Carpentries discuss list, and several Slacks, like R-Ladies and NumFOCUS. That is the time to set up a Zoom meeting using a community call template and create a landing page detailing speaker bios, event access, and related resources on our website.

A week before the event, we create a Google document for attendees to take collaborative notes and edit the intro text and slide to include the speaker’s information, the agenda, and links to these documents. Additionally, I prepare social media posts for the day of the event and a reminder post an hour before.

I run the community call on the event day with Steffi LaZerte’s support- this is the most fun part of the process!

After the call, I documented attendance and other call details. I also uploaded and edited the video, subtitles, and transcript to make them publicly available on Vimeo and our webpage. I also announced on social media that the resources were available.

I have organized ten community calls, including the first in Spanish and the first in Portuguese!

Hosting a successful community call takes a lot of time and work, but it is one of the rOpenSci activities our members enjoy the most.

Coworking Session

A coworking session was the event I used to introduce myself to the community, and it was one of the first activities I had the chance to propose small tweaks.

Our coworking sessions are generally held on the first Tuesday of the month, rotating through different timezones (Americas Pacific at 9 am, Australia Western at 9 am, and European Central at 14h). They are also free and open to all. We meet on Zoom for two hours with introductions, followed by two 40-minute coworking sessions with a mini-break and scavenger hunts in the middle. People can work in a “noisy room” where the host will be sharing and answering questions about the theme of the meeting. The other option is to work in a quiet room, where people are mute and working on their activities. People join us worldwide, and we generally have around 7 to 14 people per session.

Steffi LaZerte is organizing and running these events. My main contribution to this event was suggestions on resources and format, for example:

• Evolving the meetings into themed events chosen by the community hosts. This way, people can come to chat about the topic. For example, my first coworking was Teaching with R.

• Have a preformatted shared document with icebreakers where people can share resources, ask questions, propose future topics, or volunteer as hosts.

• Have an explicit break where people can go to do something else without the concern of missing the conversation.

• Create a space for coworking sessions on our webpage.

I support Steffi by suggesting hosts for different time zones, being the facilitator when Steffi is the host, and communicating the event.

I’m also an attendee of the coworking to make progress in my rOpenSci work. :-)

Webinars

These are also online, free, and open to all events. It is a new type of event. A rOpenSci member organizes them with my support. We already have 3 of these events.

One of the nicest characteristics is that the primary language of the event is the host’s native language. We already have events in Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish. We also organize these events with other communities or institutions, like Open Source Angola and the Boğaziçi University (Turkey).

The topics are varied. For example, Carolina Pradier hosted a webinar to present news on the eph R package after her work on the rOpenSci Champions Program, and three users of the package shared how they use it. Then Pedro Faria from Brazil and Antonio Pedro from Angola hosted an event to discuss how to contribute to the rOpenSci Dev Guide translation to Portuguese. Cagri, with Liz Hare, ran an event about using and learning R with screen readers.

The organizing phases are similar to those for the Community Call, but the rOpenSci members who organize the event take care of some tasks. We also share the recording and materials on our Vimeo channel and Event webpage.

Conferences

I have been organizing conferences for many years. Since joining rOpenSci, I have been part of the scientific committee for the Congress of AgroInformatics 2022, Nerderala 2023 and 2024 (Argentina y Mexico) and was a jury for the “Telling with Data” contest. I was also on the organizing team for seven conferences.

• useR! 2022 (online): I was the chair of the program committe. I was in charge of organizing all the tutorials, which had their call, review, selection, and agenda. I also helped with the Spanish communication of the event, the composition of the scientific committee and organizing team, selecting keynotes, contacting sponsors, and applying for conference grants. I was in charge of creating the YouTube channel for the conference and uploading all the videos of that edition. I also moderated sessions and helped gather the statistics for that edition to keep the useR! Infoboard up to date. We have 2000ish attendees.

• LatinR on line version for 2022 and 2024 and the in person LatinR 2023: I was chair of all these excellents three editions. As always we have talks and tutorials in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. All the work is 100% volunteer. It is truly a conference by and for the Latin American community. The online version has around 1000 registered, and the in-person version has around 300 participants. During 2024 we also organized our first Traslathon (Hackathon + Translation) to translate rOpenSci Dev Guide to Portuguese.

• CSV,Conf,v7 and CSC,Conf,V8, both in person: For the 2024 edition, I reviewed proposals and helped organize The Carpentries Workshop. I also included R-Ladies Puebla on the organization committee so that they could organize an R-Ladies Meetup during the conference. For the 2023 edition, I was more involved because it was in Buenos Aires. I also reviewed proposals, supported visa applications, and helped organize Carpentry workshops during the conference. I also helped with other tasks like forming the conference’s CoC Team, looking for sponsors, creating the intro slides, attending the registration desk, and chairing and moderating sessions.

• Appsilon Shiny Conference 2022: I was on the organizer committee, advising about conference platforms, accessibility, multilingual content, and potential speakers.

Champions Program training and meetings

The rOpenSci Champions Program has a first phase of training related to best practices in R package development, community management, and mentoring.

The main challenge is organizing more than 20 people in time zones more than 16 hours apart. The program also has cohort and kick-off meetings. During the second year, we add informal and optional weekly gatherings that last two hours. In these two years, I organized 13 workshops, which lasted 1 to 3 hours, 15 meetings, and 24 sessions, which lasted 1 to 2 hours.

Some of the tools I use to organize these events are:

• Google Calendar for a complete agenda of the program, scheduling and sending reminders.
• Calendly: you can link your calendar with Calendly and provide a link to other people to choose a day and time in your agenda. It is free for only one type of event. It also provides a pool option which is screen reader accesible. Have a 40 spot limit.
• Time and date: for checking time zones and calculate dates and times.
• World Time Buddy: for checking time zones and calculate dates and times.

Lessons Learned

Organizing events, whether online or in-person, requires careful planning and attention to detail.

Key aspects of organizing events

Four key aspects I consider essential for successful events are planning, promotion, engagement and feedback.

Effective planning involves selecting the right date, time, speakers, and format to match our community members' needs and expectations.

Promotion is crucial to reaching our audience with time, requiring targeted outreach through the human language of communication and platforms like social media, forums, and newsletters.

Engagement during and after the event, through using accesible tools and materials, shared note-taking, interactive Q&A sessions, a code of conduct, and follow-up content, ensures that participants feel safe, remain connected, and that the event has a lasting impact.

Finally, asking for feedback at every event and using that feedback is an essential step for learning and improving.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank all the speakers, moderators, hosts, instructors, and participants for their willingness to share their knowledge with others.