rOpenSci's Communication Channels: Twitter

Twitter is one of the preferred social media platforms and networks for the R community and for the data, open science and research communities. Since the beginning of rOpenSci we have used Twitter to connect with our community and other parallel communities, to share what we do, and to be part of conversations around the topics important to our mission.

We aim to provide a safe and friendly space for everyone in our community, and this influences how we choose which spaces we use to interact with our community members.

We’re therefore concerned about recent changes announced by Twitter (such as a reduction or loss of content moderation, among other things) which may lead to it becoming a less safe and accessible place for our community.

For the moment, based on internal discussions and inspired by other communities measures, we will:

• Continue to post on Twitter to ensure that we connect with as many people in our community as possible.

• Continue to develop our presence on Mastodon, the platform to which many of our community members have migrated.

• Explore alternative instances of Mastodon which would allow us to communicate in multiple languages (not only English) and collaborate with sister communities.

• Focus more of our communication efforts on our other platforms such as our newsletter, our discussion forum and our blog.

• Continue to monitor changes to Twitter to determine whether or not we will continue to use this platform.

Open and reproducible science is our passion, and we strongly believe that one of the best ways of promoting these concepts is to ensure our community spaces are safe, accessible, and open; places where discussions and development are diverse and friendly and where many opinions can come together.

If you have questions, concerns or comments, please contact us by email at info@ropensci.org.

Originally published in rOpenSci