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Core Team Meeting 2020-09-21

Attendance

Core team

Present: Di Cook (DC), Emily Dodwell (ED), Maya Gans (MG), Kevin O'Brien (KO), Anna Vasylytsya (AV)
Absent: Heather Turner (HT)

Sub-teams

Present: Liz Hare (LH), Michael Chirico (MC), Maria Prokofieva (MP)

Minutes

Core team/General

ACTIONS

  • Volunteer to take some notes from the recordings to text notes??

Community team

  • KOB is working with Why R? foundation during the summer and running a Webinar series.
    • One goal is to increase profile of "new" speakers and to develop the pool of potential Keynotes speakers down the line.
    • Under scenario of two UseR! conferences a year, and various other R events, there will be more Keynotes required.
  • (KOB) Brand development of Why R? to build relationships with potential "big-cheque" sponsors for Why R? and UseR!
    • This is a long term objective to generate more revenue for various programmes - Diversity & Inclusion, Accessibility, Travel Scholarships, Summer of code programmes.
    • Remark - this work aligns with the objectives of Forwards, but is probably not in Forward's mandate.
  • (KOB): Several Community team members are working on proposals for ISC funding.
  • (KOB) Why R? World: proposal to create a series of short videos featuring the R community around the world
    • The videos/interviews would explore the lived experience of being an R user (i.e. the featured guest or guests) in various locations around the world.
    • The curatorial policy shall favour a broad spectrums of locations from all continents of the world, and a broad series of subjects areas, particularly regions not typically represented in the R community.
    • Forwards Social Media Chair Lorna to be invited to participate in project development.
  • (KOB) useR! 2021 have announced their Global team, comprising of people from all over the world.
    • African R members happy that people from Africa are serving in global leadership positions (presumably the same in other cases)
  • (KOB) A question for Community Team is how best to position itself so that it can lend proper support for Critical Processes (particularly related to Branding).

ACTIONS

  • Determine the new role for Community Team (now that several key projects have matured / progressed and should be demerged from the Community Team).

Conferences team

  • (LH): Joined conferences last year to focus on accessibility.
    • GitHub draft of best practices for accessible conferences is available in Events. Includes guidelines for presenters (including captioning talks if recorded, making files available so blind person using screen-reading software can follow along): https://github.com/forwards/event_best_practices and https://github.com/forwards/event_best_practices/blob/master/accessability_guidelines_user20202lh.MD
    • More work to do: customize for in-person vs. remote events
    • Working with useR! 2021 on accessibility. LH is in touch with people with different types of disabilities to add insights to the draft (more to add).
      • Interested in further input (suggestions and thoughts), particularly from conference organizers themselves
      • Thus far, LH has reached out to people she knows and others via social media
      • Examples of implementations and tools that can be used (e.g. considerations: Website is screen-reader accessible, scheduling, markup document to follow along with code)
      • Automatic captions are not good enough ("craptions"). Real-time captioning with person typing is gold standard (require materials in advance to develop familiarity with terminology)
    • (DC) Ideally a version would be available on the main web site -Team needs feedback on current draft. Has there been a Forwards tweet requesting feedback? (LH: Yes)
      • Have any conferences been able to implement? Need to gather feedback and further information as suggestions are rolled out at conferences.

ACTIONS

  • Way to solicit input from other people (expand representation among types of disabilities) -- perhaps tweet from Forwards account that can be shared more widely? Invitation out to others to join Forwards for continued work.
  • ED to follow up with sign-up list for status update of people LH has invited to contribute.
  • Goal is ultimately to make available via Forwards public page, including ability to provide feedback (unless there's anything sensitive we'd like to keep within group/word-of-mouth among organizers?). In particular, language around disability requires care, and LH would appreciate input.

On-ramps team

  • (HT) We had our second meeting on R Core Contribution and decided on some tasks to start work on:
    • R Dev guide: https://github.com/forwards/rdevguide, which Maya Gans has started. Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal is applying for a Tweag fellowship to develop this futher.
    • MG: Bookdown is modeled after Python Devguide and captures key Core questions about code base (e.g. What kind of version control should be used that would be most inclusive? Should we use GitHub/other Git option?). R pipeline may quickly diverge from Python Devguide; populating structure is next step.
      • MG is leveraging being new to Core contributions to work on this project, and therefore it requires checking that her mental model is correct as she goes along. Other that may want to be involved are welcome to help, and MC is getting involved.
      • (DC) We may want to make accessible on the web (not necessarily public); compiled version would be helpful.
    • (HT) Dev stream at useR! 2021. Laura Ación is heading this up and has had initial discussions with Luke Tierney. Gabe Becker has also offered to contribute.
    • (HT) Online space to foster contributor community - some debate over the best platform to use, I will be looking into this more.
    • (HT) Review of development platform/practices and interplay with diversity and inclusion. Idea is to create an initial short document to begin with, to set out the principles. Jenny Bryan is helping with this. See full details here: https://github.com/forwards/rcontribution/issues - feel free to join in discussion/volunteer to help move things along.

ACTIONS

  • Need mentorship for MG (MC has agreed to help/mentor)
  • Need a github pages so compiled version or R Dev Guide can be viewed online, and more contributors are needed.

Social media team

  • Maria (MP) is new member! Goal: Connecting and making teams of people through social media (identity opportunities to contribute and collaborate).
  • (DC) Getting blog entries out on regular basis is important for visibility

Surveys

  • (AV) Completed Package Maintainers Demographics 2017 section on the Forwards data webpage
  • (AV) useR! 2020 survey data collection completed.
  • (AV) Latin America survey on the use of R is live and data collection is on-going

ACTIONS

  • useR2020 survey results need to be analyzed (AV needs to confirm who has taken on this task)
    • HT may have organised the analysis to be conducted

Teaching

  • (HT) Potential funding via Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship Program (r-devel/rcwg#7) requires US based applicant who is able to receive funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (U.S. government labs, U.S. universities, and U.S.-based corporations.). The teaching team could apply for giving workshops if we have an eligible person to act as the applicant. Deadline 30 September.
  • ED to check teaching team minutes for goals of next workshops -- JR had ideas for NYC?
    • (DC) Goal for some R Consortium funding to support workshops in Asia, but intended conference went remote.
  • Modularising package development into a bookdown.

ACTIONS

AOB

  • Next slackathon will be weekend of November 13th.