Revolutions

Gender Diversity in the R and Python Communities

Many (if not most) tech communities have far more representation from men than from women (and even fewer from nonbinary folk). This is a shame, because everybody uses software, and these projects would self-evidently benefit from the talent and expertise from across the entire community. Some projects are doing better than others, though, and data scientist Reshama Shaikh recently published an in-depth comparison of the representation of women in the R any Python communities.

Shaikh's analysis draws from several data sources, which provide evidence that women are better represented in the R community in the Python community. These include:

• The R-Ladies community has 29,500 members compared to PyLadies' 36,500, despite the Python community being 6x larger overall.
• A 2016 study of GitHub contributors estimates R contributors are 9.3% women, and 2.0% for Python contributors.
• In a 2017 R Consortium survey of R users, 14% of respondents identified as women.
• The 2018 New York R conference had 45% women speakers; the 2016 useR! conference had 28% female attendees. 

Several reasons are offered for the relative success of the R community in this regard, but in my opinion the most important of these is the vibrancy of the R-Ladies network, which now comprises 134 chapters worldwide. Shaikh lists some steps that the Python community are taking to address the issue, and provides several additional suggestions as well. You can read the complete analysis and recommendations in the blog post linked below. 

Reshama Shaikh: Why Women Are Flourishing In R Community But Lagging In Python

Diversity scholarships for upcoming R conferences

One of the greatest things about the R community is its diversity. This is largely thanks to organizations like Forwards and R-Ladies, who have been instrumental in welcoming women and other under-represented groups to the world of R. Likewise, conferences in the R community encourage diversity, with open codes of conduct, facilitations like on-site child-care, and by offering scholarships for travel and lodging to encourage attendees from diverse backgrounds. 

Here are three upcoming R community events that are offering diversity scholarships:

The rOpenSci Unconference (May 21-22, Seattle) is now accepting self-nominations to participate. You can request travel support as part of the application process, and the organizers "strongly encourage applications from women and other underrepresented genders, people of color, people who are LGBTQ, people with disabilities or any other underrepresented minorities in research". Applications are open now.

The eRum 2018 Conference (May 14-16, Budapest, Hungary) will include a Package Development Workshop for Women presented by Forwards, which is also offering scholarships to attend (thanks to funding from the R Consortium). The deadline to apply is February 25.

The useR! 2018 Conference (July 10-13, Brisbane, Australia) is offering scholarships for those seeking financial aid to attend, and in addition R-Ladies Melbourne is offering two $500 travel scholarships. Applications are open now.

If you're thinking about applying, Forwards offers useful tips for applying for diversity scholarships.

 

R Consortium funding for projects and R user groups

If you're an organizer of an R-focused meetup group, or are planning a community-led R conference, the 2018 R Consortium R User Group Support Program is now accepting applications for sponsorship. The 2017 program funded 76 user groups and 3 small conferences, and the program is expanding further in 2018. User groups now also receive a complimentary Meetup.com Pro account, and the grant levels for small conferences have increased. 

Similarly, if you have an idea for a project that could benefit the R community, the first ISC Call for Proposals for 2018 is now open. The Infrastructure Steering Committee of the R Consortium considers proposals from the community, and awards grants to those that are approved by the committee. Prior awardees have included the DBI package, R-hub, and Forwards Workshops for Women and Girls.

These are fantastic programs benefiting all R users, in support of the R Consortium mission to foster the continued growth of R community and to support development of software to help R users. Funding for these programs comes from R Consortium members, so if you'd like to see more such programs consider asking your employer to join. 

R Consortium: The 2018 R Consortium R User Group Support Program is Underway ; R Consortium Call For Proposals: February 2018

Learnings from 5 months of R-Ladies Chicago (Part 1)

by Angela Li, founder and organizer of R-Ladies Chicago. This article also appears on Angela's personal blog.

It’s been a few months since I launched R-Ladies Chicago, so I thought I’d sit down and write up some things that I’ve learned in the course of organizing this wonderful community. Looking back, there are a few things I wish someone told me at the beginning of the process, which I’ll share here over the course of a few weeks. The hope is that you can use these learnings to organize tech communities in your own area.

Chicago #RLadies ❤️ R! Group photo from tonight's Meetup @MicrosoftR (thanks @revodavid for the shirts) @RLadiesGlobal @d4tagirl #rstats pic.twitter.com/VUiym1LlID

— R-Ladies Chicago (@RLadiesChicago) October 27, 2017

Note: some of this information may be more specific to Chicago, a major city in the US that has access to many resources, or to R-Ladies as a women’s group in particular. I tried to write down more generalizable takeaways. If you’re interested in starting a tech meetup in your community, R-related or not, use this series as a resource!

Part 1: Starting the Meetup

Sometimes, it just takes someone who’s willing: 

• The reason R-Ladies didn’t exist in Chicago before July wasn’t because there weren’t women using R in Chicago, or because there wasn’t interest in the community in starting a Meetup. It was just that no one had gotten around to it. I had a few people after our first Meetup say to me that they’d been interested in a R-Ladies Meetup for a long time, but had been waiting for someone to organize it. Guess what…that person could be you! 
• I also think people might have been daunted by the prospect of starting a Chicago Meetup, because it’s such a big city and it’s intimidating to organize a group without already knowing a few people. If you’re in a smaller place, consider it a benefit that you're drawing from a smaller, tight-knit community of folks who use R.
• If you can overcome the hurdle of starting something, you’ll be amazed at how many people will support you. Start the group and folks will come.

You don’t have to be the most skilled programmer to lead a successful Meetup:

• This is a super harmful mindset, and something that plagues women in tech in particular. I struggled with this a lot at the outset: “I’m not qualified to lead this. There’s no way I can explain in great detail EVERY SINGLE THING about R to someone else. Heck, I haven’t used R for 10+ years. Someone else would probably be better at this than am.” 
• The thing is, the skillset that it takes to organize a community is vastly different than the skillset that it takes to write code. You’re thinking about how to welcome beginners, encourage individuals to contribute, teach new skills, and form relationships between people. The very things that you believe make you “less qualified” as a programmer are the exact things that are valuable in this context — you understand the struggles of learning R, because you were recently going through that process yourself. Or you're more accessible for someone to ask questions to, because they aren’t intimidated by you. 
• Being able to support and encourage your fellow R users is something you can do no matter what your skill level is. There are women in our group who have scads more experience in R than I do. That’s fantastic! My job as an organizer is to showcase and use the skills of the individuals in our community, and if I can get these amazing women to lead workshops, that’s less work for me AND great for them! Pave the way for people to do awesome stuff.

Get yourself cheerleaders:

• I cannot emphasize enough how important it was to have voices cheering me on as I was setting this up. The women in my office who told me they’d help me set up the first Meetup. My friends who told me they’d come to the first meeting (even if they didn’t use R). The R-Ladies across the globe who were so supportive and excited that a Chicago group was starting. When I doubted myself, there was someone there to encourage me. 
• Even better, start a Meetup with a friend and cheer each other on! If I could do this over again, I’d make sure I had co-organizers from the very start. More about this in weeks to come :)
• Especially if you’re starting a R-Ladies group, realize that there’s a wider #rstats and @RLadiesGlobal community in place to support you. Each group is independent and has its own needs and goals, but there are so many people to turn to if you have questions. The beauty of tech communities is that you’re often already connected to people across the globe through online platforms. All you need to know is: you’re not going it alone!
• The R community itself is incredibly supportive, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much support R-Ladies Chicago has received from David Smith and the team at Microsoft. Not only did they promote the group, but I reached out to David a month or so after starting the group, and he immediately offered to sponsor the group, get swag, and provide space for us. R-Ladies Chicago would be in a different place without Microsoft's generous contributions. I’m grateful for their support of the group as we got off the ground.

Next week: I’ll be talking about Meetup-to-Meetup considerations, or things you should be thinking about in the process of organizing an event for your group!

The R community is one of R's best features

R is incredible software for statistics and data science. But while the bits and bytes of software are an essential component of its usefulness, software needs a community to be successful. And that's an area where R really shines, as Shannon Ellis explains in this lovely ROpenSci blog post. For software, a thriving community offers developers, expertise, collaborators, writers and documentation, testers, agitators (to keep the community and software on track!), and so much more. Shannon provides links where you can find all of this in the R community:

• #rstats hashtag — a responsive, welcoming, and inclusive community of R users to interact with on Twitter
• R-Ladies — a world-wide organization focused on promoting gender diversity within the R community, with more than 30 local chapters
• Local R meetup groups — a google search may show that there's one in your area! If not, maybe consider starting one! Face-to-face meet-ups for users of all levels are incredibly valuable
• Rweekly — an incredible weekly recap of all things R
• R-bloggers — an awesome resource to find posts from many different bloggers using R
• DataCarpentry and Software Carpentry — a resource of openly available lessons that promote and model reproducible research
• Stack Overflow — chances are your R question has already been answered here (with additional resources for people looking for jobs)

I'll add a couple of others as well:

• R Conferences — The annual useR! conference is the major community event of the year, but there are many smaller community-led events on various topics. 
• Github — there's a fantastic community of R developers on Github. There's no directory, but the list of trending R developers is a good place to start.
• The R Consortium — proposing or getting involved with an R Consortium project is a great way to get involved with the community

As I've said before, the R community is one of the greatest assets of R, and is an essential component of what makes R useful, easy, and fun to use. And you couldn't find a nicer and more welcoming group of people to be a part of.

To learn more about the R community, be sure to check out Shannon's blog post linked below.

ROpenSci Blog: Hey! You there! You are welcome here

Studying disease with R: RECON, The R Epidemics Consortium

For almost a year now, a collection of researchers from around the world has been collaborating to develop the next generation of analysis tools for disease outbreak response using R. The R Epidemics Consortium (RECON) creates R packages for handling, visualizing, and analyzing outbreak data using cutting-edge statistical methods, along with general-purpose tools for data cleaning, versioning, and encryption, and system infrastructure. Like ROpenSci, the Epidemics Consortium is focused on developing efficient, reliable, and accessible open-source tools, but with a focus on epidemology as opposed to science generally.

The Epidemics Consortium has already created several useful resources for epidemiology:

• outbreaks, an R package containing a collection of disease outbreak data
• epicontacts, an R package for handling epidemiological contact data
• incidence, an R package to compute, visualize and model disease incidents
• A tutorial on phylogenetics with R
• A set of guidelines for package development

There are also a large number of additional packages under development.

RECON welcomes new members, particularly experienced R developers and as public health officers specialized in outbreak response. You can find information on how to join here, and general information about the R Epidemics Consortium at the link below.

RECON: The R Epidemics Consortium (via Maëlle Salmon‏)

 

List of R conferences and user groups

For 8 years now, we've maintained a list of local R user groups here at the Revolutions blog. This is a list that began with a single group (the Bay Area RUG, the first and still one of the largest groups), and now includes 360 user groups worldwide (including 27 specifically for women).

As the list has grown in size, it's become harder to manage. Thankfully, Colin Gillespie of Jumping Rivers Consulting has risen to the task, by creating a new website based on a GitHub repository that anyone can contribute to. I've updaed the Local R User Group Directory to point to these new pages, specifically the lists of:

• R User Groups
• R-Ladies Groups
• R Conferences and Meetings

If you have a group of your own, contributing to the list is easy. All you need is a GitHub account, and you can click the Edit button to edit one of the R Markdown pages directly. If you're not familiar with R Markdown, you can also suggest an edit via the Issues page.

(Incidentally, It would be great to automate the process of generating a count and a map of local R user groups. If anyone wants to take up the challenge of writing an R script to process the Rmd pages, please do!)

As R grows in popularity, it's awesome to see local communities get together and form these groups. If you'd like to start one yourself, here are some tips on starting up a local user group.

GitHub: A list of R conferences and meetings

 

Diversity in the R Community

In the follow-up to the useR! conference in Stanford last year, the Women in R Task force took the opportunity to survey the 900-or-so participants about their backgrounds, experiences and interests. With 455 responses, the recently-published results provide an interesting snapshot about the R community (or at least that subset able to travel to the US and who were able to register before the conference sold out). Among the findings (there are summaries; check the report for the detailed breakdowns):

• 33% of attendees identified as women
• 26% of attendees identified as other than White or Caucasian
• 5% of attendees identified as LGBTQ

The report also includes some interesting demographic analysis of the attendees, including the map of home country distribution shown below. The report also offers recommendations for future conferences, one of which has already been implemented: the useR!2017 conference in Brussels will offer child-care for the first time.

Relatedly, the Women in R Task Force has since expanded its remit to promoting other under-represented groups in the R community as well. To reflect the new focus, the task force is now called Forwards, and invites members of the R community to participate. If you have an interest in supporting diversity in race, gender, sexuality, class or disability, follow that link to get in touch.

Forwards: Mapping useRs

All the R Ladies

Two groups are making and impact in improving the gender diversity of R users worldwide. The R-Ladies organization is creating chapters worldwide to facilitate female R programmers meeting and working together, and the Taskforce on Women in the R Community is working to improve the participation and experience of women in the R community.

R has more participation by women than many programming communities, but there's still a long way to go towards equity: the R Foundation's Women in R Taskforce estimates that between 11% and 15% of R package authors are women. (The count is based on package author first names; some manual corrections were needed because Hadley is categorized by genderizeR as a female name.)

In 2012, Gabriela de Queiroz founded the first women-focused R user group in San Francisco. Since then, "R Ladies" concept has expanded to a global franchise in eleven cities:

• San Francisco, California, USA 
• Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA
• London, England
• Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA
• Los Angeles, California, USA
• New York, New York, USA
• Melbourne, Australia
• Madrid, Spain
• Istanbul, Turkey
• Paris, France
• Boston, Massachusetts, USA

This is a great first step to increasing the participation by women in a currently male-dominated field. As the R-Ladies leadership note in their grant application to the R Consortium (which was funded in July):

The R community suffers from an underrepresentation of women in every role and area of participation, whether as leaders, package developers, conference speakers, conference participants, educators, or users. The R community needs to promote the growth of this major untapped demographic by pro­actively supporting women to fulfill their potential, thus enabling and achieving greater participation.

In addition to the groups created by R-Ladies, the Women in R Task Force is making strides towards achieving these goals. For example, the next useR! conference in Brussels will strive for gender balance amongst invited speakers, tutors, and committee and session chairs, and ensure particpation by women on panel discussions. Childcare will also be provided at the conference, and gender statistics will be published on the website. 

For more information on R-Ladies (including contacts to help you create a local chapter in your area), and the Women in R Taskforce, follow the links below.

R-Ladies Global : Women in R Taskforce

User Groups and R Awareness

by Joseph Rickert

For quite a few years now we have attempted to maintain the Revolution Analytics' Local R User Group Directory as the complete and authoritative list of R user groups. Meetup groups make this list in one of two ways: we discover the group because they have a web page of some sort proclaiming the group to be focused on the R language or someone from the group writes to us asking to have the group included in our list. We have deliberately pursued a relatively conservative strategy in growing the list, resisting the temptation to include every data science user group that may have had an R related presentation. Even so, we have been pleased to note the slow but steady growth of R user groups, and delighted to see quite a few relatively new meetup groups from South America and Africa make our list which, as of today, includes 235 groups.

However, it is interesting to occasionally take a broader view. Meetup.com, a very popular site for hosting user meetups of all stripes, lists a number of groups who identify with the keyword "R Project For Statistical Computing" in their "We're About" section. Using the site's tools to filter on this keyword will bring you to a page (Subject to daily fluctuations) containing somewhere in the neighborhood of 358 meetup spread over 223 cities and 55 countries. The following plot displays the top 25 meetups by number of members for May 15, 2016.

 

 

Most of these are indeed R user groups, or at least data science user groups with an interest in R. However, the presence of Find a Tech Job in London in the top 25 indicates that interest in R is spreading to a somewhat wider audience throughout the worldwide tech culture. So, while the Local R User Group Directory is still likely to be your best bet to finding a hard core RUG, meetup.com may lead you an R conversation in some surprising places.

My simple code to produce the chart may be downloaded here:  Download Scrape_meetup