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

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.

Now that you have created your package, presenting it to the world is a crucial step to gain visibility and attract users . Marketing your package effectively contributes to reaching the people your package can support, finding users to assist you in maintaining and improving your package and allowing you to learn about how people use it. In this blog post we suggest a series of activities and tools for advertising your

Maintaining a package can be a lonesome activity, which sometimes poses a problem if you prefer team work or if you encounter a very thorny-for-you problem.Beside belonging to a supportive community of maintainers (like rOpenSci 😉), for collaborative help and commiseration you can try to build a community of contributors around your package!In this post, we’ll explore one tool helping you towards that goal: “help wanted” issues, with which your

Part of what we aim to do at rOpenSci is nurture a community of package maintainers who help each other.In addition to support during package maintenance, we also want to support maintainers who wish to move on. Situations can change, and there may come a time when a maintainer is looking to pass maintenance on to another.

The rOpenSci suite of packages is mainly composed of packages contributed by the community through peer-review, but also includes some packages maintained by staff.Over time, the commitments and availability of the original developers of a package can change. This leads to some maintainers stepping down from their maintainer role, or other maintainers looking to lower their workload through more teamwork and therefore looking for co-maintainers.

In March we held a Community Call discussing the maintenance of R packages.This call included a starting presentation by Julia Silge followed by a discussion featuring panelists with a wide variety of backgrounds: Elin Waring, Erin Grand, Leonardo Collado-Torres and Scott Chamberlain.

For this Community Call, we’re trying something different. We’ll start with a short talk by Julia Silge , then spend most of the time on Q & A with four panelists - Elin Waring , Erin Grand , Leonardo Collado-Torres , and Scott Chamberlain - moderated by Julia. Our panelists bring a wide range of perspectives so there’s something for everyone.