# Incubator: Five principles to grow up your R community

Organization: CDSB

Panelists:
- Joselyn Chávez
- Erick Cuevas-Fernández
- Leonardo Collado-Torres

CDSB SLACK https://comunidadbioinfo.slack.com
Twitter @CDSBMexico

Collaborative exercises:

1) Let's meet each other! Write your name and the name of your community e.g. Joselyn Chávez, CDSB

- gwynn, RLadiesDC, Harvard R User Group
- Erick, CDSB, México. my twitter @ErickCuevasF
- Teresa Ortiz, RLadies CDMX
- Linda Cabrera, RLadies Guayaquil, Ecuador
- Pyry Kantanen, rOpenGov, Finland
- Beatriz Valdez, Venezuela. My community will be RLadies Venezuela (I hope we are lauching this chapter soon)
- Janani Ravi, RLadiesEastLansing & AsiaR | @Janani137 (Tw) | @jananiravi (GH) | jravilab.github.io
- Sara Mortara, R-Ladies Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Ricardo Flores, México-Irlanda @RiccoFG
- Yasmin Mahmoud: There is R group at my university (University College London,UK).I am attending its events;that is why I am here !
- Juan Camilo Sanchez Arcila, Colombia-Estados Unidos (UC Merced). Community: Carpentries. Twitter @sanchezarcilaJC
- Steffi LaZerte, rOpenSci / rLadies / ???
- Stefanie Butland, rOpenSci, @stefaniebutland
- Matt Ritchie, Bioconductor Community Advisory Board, Melbourne, Australia, @mritchieau
- Guadalupe Medina, RLadies CDMX
- Kevin Rodberg, South Florida Water Mgmt
- Mirna Vazquez Rosas Landa, Rladies Xalapa, @MirnaVRL
- Kenneth Cabrera, Medellín, Colombia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Not community yet.

2) Do you think you could apply any of the five principles on your community? Which one?

- We have tried a few of these principles -- no collaborative project yet (like the BioC one) -- I think that's a great idea to bring together the community!
- These principles are going to be extremely useful for us in Venezuela
- I will try to apply "Principle 2: Provide continuous support" because I think that if the community is not interacting continuosly, it could stagnate. I also think that it is important in thinking about sharing responsabilities/work inside the community, sharing some of the relevant activities between the members to not overload the members and giving opportunities to participate to new members.
- I think I could apply those principles in my home country (Egyptyptyptyptyptypt)...... Awesome!!
- Within our agency we have over 40 R users, some with exceptional coding skill, others with an interest, but do not have much experience or access to someone within their work group. We have attempted informal userGroups, but, its ususally just the same people doing all the work all the time.

3) How can we help? Do you have a specific case you need some advice about?

- How do you get sponsors? and for how long?
* We reached out to R Consortium and Bioconductor for advice on this, and they told us that we should plan to have our website ready about a year in advance of any event, so we can request support from companies before their budgets close for a given year. We typically request support from the R Consortium and a friend referred us to the Code for Science and Society 2021 funding call. We try to network through Twitter, Slack and other options, and well, you never know which contact will think that your organization is a right fit for a specific funding call.
- Do you have tips for growing your community?
* Try to recruit a new person to join the board of your community every year. Provide opportunities for people to grow: as students with courses of increasing difficulty levels, but also on the organizational side, from teaching assistants to guest instructors to main instructors.
- Do you have any tips on how to bring more diversity to the community? (at where I am R-Ladies for instance is still too white and privileged - myself included)
* We have requested information from scholarship applicants that has helped us support people from more diverse backgrounds and upbringings.
- Any suggestions on how to make this endeavor sustainable (not the same people doing the work each time year after year)? Any tips/suggestions to build this long-term like the iterative teaching cycle would be most appreciated! [I'll second that] Reponse from Erick: The funders of CDSB now live out of Mexico, one tip it is they support us with a lot of experience but we try to invite new board members each year from Mexico.
- Is it better to build a local community first or go directly to national level? Are face-to-face meetups better than virtual events
* You can always call your local community a national one since you never know who will be willing to travel to your location for your event. It provides a larger platform to recruit help and for visibility. I would go local only if you are planning on keeping it that way.
* in the initial stages? Yes but, well, in the first 6 moths of pandemic, CDSB organice one anual workshop that is usually in person, but with the pandemic CDSB doit in Virtual format.
- renewal of the team/community
* We always have a community building activity during our events to highlight to others that we are regular people like them, and that if they want to, there's plenty of areas that they can contribute to. That is, we want new people to feel welcomed and engaged with our community goals. We then make sure to invite those who expressed more interest to participate more: from applying for a conference scholarship, to submitting an abstract, to helping out as a teaching assistant or guest instructor.

- Do you have a code of conduct in Spanish for your events?
* (https://comunidadbioinfo.github.io/es/codigo-de-conducta/)
- How to start a local R Ladies group and encouarge women to join especially in developing coutries ?
*
- How hard is it to find sponsors for countries like Venezuela, which it is under international sanctions and some people are afraid of being punished for financing initiaves under this conditions? Any sugestion?
* You would need to know the rules very well so you can clarify that for others. Alternatively, maybe you can get someone willing to receive the money in another country and send it directly to those involved.
- How to encourage community to present topics? It seems we have 2-3 major speakers, and people seem shy to present.
* +1! I'd love to organize a local community, but am afraid I'd end up doing all the presenting...
* The same happened in my community, keep inviting people to be speakers, all the time! you can then schedule them for later
* (*one option*) During the pandemic, it is possible to invite speakers from other similar time zones -- it doesn't involve a lot of $$ but you will get the much needed variety + exposure to external speakers
* Response from Erick: Apply, if you need in our slack we have a channel where we announce R events, and we encourage you to participate and how to participate, especially the members who have more experience help you.
* Thanks all! :)
- Sounds like your cycle of moving up to the board after a short period, may help encourage additional participation.
* Yes, we try to invite one new member for the board team each year.
- How has the switch to running virtual events affected attendance at your meetings?
* It has increased it quite a bit since the physical rooms we have access to can only fit 40 students, whereas through Zoom you can have 100 people or so logged in. In addition, we have now uploaded videos to YouTube and have nearly 400 subscribers, so our material is being reused more frequently by the community we server.
- How to deal with different backgrounds [academic] in the process of building the community (I understand that the diversity is important, but for certain topics, like bioinformatics... etc). Any experience working together with social sciences? Great, thanks! :)
* This is challenging, but well, we can't do it all. Since our local connections are centered around bioinformatics, we aim to provide interesting courses for bioinformaticians. But we also highlight that we have courses that anyone can take. Yet we struggle with getting enough students for those courses. I think that it'll take time for us to grow our network outside bioinformatics, and for now, we just need to keep up our efforts.

Link to Slack https://join.slack.com/t/comunidadbioinfo/shared_invite/zt-8lsvpm84-Fne1W0hadk6cpjgJS17Tnw