Do you remember your first contribution to open source?Or are you still waiting to make it? Contributing to open source can be very rewarding, but also incredibly intimidating.When we asked about first time contributions on the rOpenSci Slack,people recalled the challenges and mistakes they made, but mostly how much they learned from and enjoyed that experience.For open source maintainers, contributions can also lead to mixed feelings,as
Exciting News! The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded rOpenSci a new grant to foster sustainable scientific software as a pillar of Open Science in Latin America by building capacity and community. With this $340K grant, we’re planning to launch a Spanish-language version of our Champions Program, along with other new initiatives to make sustainable software development more accessible to researchers across the region.
Over the past thirty years I have written five technical books,co-written three others,and edited a further six.Since 2007 they have all lived in GitHub repositories,as did the first versions of the Software Carpentry lessons that I helped to write.
R is a language and environment for statistical computing.There are several tools and approaches for interacting with R, but not all are accessible with screen readers.This guide provides an overview of the tools and techniques available to screen reader users across different operating systems, with practical tips and resources to help them navigate the R environment.This guide may not be complete, but I hope it serves as a valuable starting
R packages, like any software, require maintenance. Package maintenance includes: Fixing bugs when discovered. Adapting to updates in package dependencies. Providing some level of user and contributor support. When desired, refactoring code or adding new functionality. Without maintenance efforts a package is at risk of losing its value. Yet, maintaining a package for years or even decades can be challenging as it is time consuming.
On June 14 I was invited to present at the CZI Open Science 2024 event. I was asked to participate in “Case Study Session 3: Demonstrating Impact of Open Science” and to explore the challenges of using traditional academic metrics for measuring project impact with an emphasis on alternative approaches. I was very excited to share our experiences and to learn from others projects. Here I present a summary of this talk.
In June 2022 I (Yani) become the rOpenSci Community Manager. To do a good job in this kind of role it is essential to know your community, so as soon I started I dug in: reading our documentation, learning our processes and their metrics, and conducting interviews with team-mates and community members.
We are happy to announce the brand-new R Consortium Multilingual Working Group.This Working Group came about after discussions during the R Project Sprint 2023 and will oversee the implementation of multilingual documentation support in R and organise community translation efforts.Our first project is the (experimental) rhelpi18n package, which adds multilingual documentation support!
Do you maintain an open-source project like an R package or a collection thereof, and wonder how to best use various communication channels to inform and engage with your community of users?We’ve consolidated this list of tips.Some of them are required in our opinion, others are simply nice to have.
The goal of the rOpenSci Champions Program is to enable more members of historically excluded groups to participate in, benefit from, and become leaders in the R, research software engineering, and open source and open science communities. This program includes 1-on-1 mentoring for the Champions as they complete a project and perform outreach activities in their local communities.
