OxfordRUG October 2023 | Sustainability and ED&I in the R Project

For our next meetup on 30th October, we are very excited to have Heather Turner giving a talk on "Sustainability and ED&I in the R Project"

Agenda:

6:00 pm: Talk "Sustainability and ED&I in the R Project" by Heather Turner

7:00 pm: Pizza!

Abstract:

The R Project is over 20 years old, but its future is not secure - several of the R Core Team are nearing or post retirement and there are not enough new contributors to sustain the work. In this talk, I will present a number of initiatives, fostered under my EPSRC RSE Fellowship: 'Sustainability and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in the R Project', that are designed to encourage and train a new, more diverse, generation of contributors.

The initiatives vary from regular support on the R Contributor Slack and in R Contributor Office Hours, to one-off events aimed at new contributors such as a Collaboration Campfire series and a Bug BBQ. I will report back on the recent R Project Sprint 2023, hosted at Warwick University, which brought members of the R Core Team together with both novice and experienced contributors to work in collaboration - the first event of this kind in the R community. I will discuss how we hope to keep the momentum going and how R users can get involved.

Speaker bio:

Heather Turner is a Research Software Engineering Fellow in the Statistics department at Warwick University. She has been an R user since 2001 and is co-author of several CRAN packages, notably the statistical modelling packages gnm, BradleyTerry2 and PlackettLuce. Heather is heavily involved in community management and engagement among users and developers of R. She leads the R Contribution Working Group, which is a collaboration between the R Core Team and R community groups.

Thanks to our sponsor:

Oxford RUG is greateful for funding from the R consortium.