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R Contribution Working Group: fostering a larger, more diverse community of contributors to R core development
https://contributor.r-project.org/working-group
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Further Collaboration Campfires #32

Open hturner opened 1 year ago

hturner commented 1 year ago

We had a good response to the series of Collaboration Campfires and there is some interest in continuing the series. What would be most of interest to potential participants and most effective in encouraging contributions to R?

Some options (not mutually exclusive)

A: Re-run the same sessions, but at a different time e.g. 09:00 UTC to be afternoon/evening Asia/Pacific

B: Build on previous topics, with more hands-on contribution (adding translations, triaging bugs)

C: Address new topics: maybe installing R from source, testing/creating a patch, other ideas?

Interested to hear what people think.

llrs commented 1 year ago

The installing R from source would be nice for documenting what troubles do people find with current documentation or their setup and might help the GSOD project (or vice versa) if it is planned/done early (or late).

I also think there is some interest for source installation because it is very useful for CRAN tests having side by side installations.

A and B are also very good ideas. On Bioconductor there have been two translation workshops already.

SaranjeetKaur commented 1 year ago

The above are good ideas!

Maybe we could explore on running a lightweight version of the campfires, which driven more by the kind of participants that join them each time.

Few thoughts that come to my mind are:

  1. Running them like regular (say, once a month) office hour for new contributors - where people are welcome to join with the questions they are facing while contributing to R, and/or joining to just experience this area of work.
  2. The office hour need not have a pre-determined agenda/topic each time - however, we could re-run the previous sessions for different time zones. Need to think a bit more on how the timings could be decided, a couple of examples below, to be able to cover the major time zones:
    • Jan: Asia-Pacific, Feb: UK-Europe, Mar: US, Apr: Asia - Pacific, May: UK-Europe, Jun: US, ... , Dec: US (this one is more evenly throughout the year for all time zones)
    • Jan-Feb-Mar-Apr: Asia-Pacific, May-Jun-Jul-Aug: UK-Europe, Sep-Oct-Nov-Dec: US (this one is convenient to remember, although it is not evenly spread throughout the year)
  3. We can have a broader open list of topics shared publicly which we can use to draw upon when we want any of the office hours to have pre-determined theme(s).
EllaKaye commented 1 year ago

All of the above are good ideas! Bugzilla takes practice and lots of familiarisation, so lots of opportunities to get familiar with it, with guidance from those who know the ropes, would be appreciated. I like @SaranjeetKaur's suggestion of regular office hours.

hturner commented 1 year ago

At the R Contribution Working Group meeting, we decided to try the idea of Office Hours. Tentative plan:

hturner commented 1 year ago

We didn't discuss at the RCWG meeting, but potentially we could hold a one-off Collaboration Campfire in Oct/Nov on installing R from source to test the new material from the Google Season of Docs project.

Then perhaps consider running the whole series again next year, aimed at a different time zone to reach a new audience.