R package hackathlons

[gaborcsardi]

Online events, to hack on an R package or two for a day or a long evening.

Package authors can submit their package(s) and volunteers can vote on what they want to hack on, 2-3 weeks before the event. The package(s) with the most votes are selected for the event. The package maintainer agrees to review the PRs on the day of the event. People could work on documentation, code, design, anything really. Ideally the package maintainer would have or open a lot of issues in the package's repository, and label them according to topics and difficulty: e.g. "good-for-beginners", "improve-docs", "coding", "advanced-coding", etc.

It would go similarly to the ropensci hackathlons, but organized online, and more targeted (targeted in terms of packages/code, not people). They should be on weekends, maybe, on Saturdays.

The consortium could

• help with the organization, e.g. the voting for the packages to hack on,
• provide some online chat/collaboration platform, sg similar to slack,
• give every participant (e.g. people that made at least one comment on hackathlon issues / pull requests) R hackathlon t-shirts.

[karthik]

I love this idea! I'm happy to help with some organization but can't spearhead.

[njtierney]

I love this idea as well, I would be keen to help organise.