window.intercomSettings = { app_id: "w29sqomy", custom_launcher_selector:'#open_web_chat' };Skip to main content
Tag

SatRdays

Latin American Communities and Organizations: useR!2020 Video

By Blog

This useR!2020 session and video was organized by Laura Acion, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Paola Corrales, and Paloma Rojas Saunero. Leonardo Collado Torres coordinated the blog post submission.

On June 19th, 2020, we filmed a video for useR!2020 showcasing the communities and organizations we are involved in that are for Latin Americans or have Latin American participants. In this blog post, we wanted to highlight these initiatives and remind everyone that we are more than happy to help you launch similar initiatives in your local communities.

  • LatinR: LatinR is a trilingual international conference on the use of R in research and development across Latin America. Since launching in 2018, our annual meetings have been a starting point for new packages, local user groups, reading clubs, R-Ladies chapters, translations, and other initiatives in the region.
  • ConectaR: ConectaR 2019 took place during January 24-26, 2019 at the University of Costa Rica, in San José, Costa Rica. It was the first event in Central America endorsed by The R Foundation, and it was held completely in Spanish. You can find more information here.
  • satRday: SatRday is a conference about R and its applications, that happens all over the world, and it is organized by the local community. Two satRdays events happened in Latin America: in Santiago – Chile and São Paulo – Brazil. If you want to organize a satRday anywhere in Latin America, please get it touch so we can help each other!
  • R-Ladies: R-Ladies is a global organisation that promotes gender diversity in the R community. It has 123 active chapters in 51 countries around the world, of which 49 are found across 10 Latin American countries. Some Latin Americans are part of the R-Ladies Global Team, including its leadership. COVID-19 has not stopped us, instead, we have migrated online and fostered alliances among different chapters. All in an effort to give gender minorities in the R community the opportunity to learn R in a safe and supportive environment. Join us!
  • rOpenSci: R for open science, rOpenSci, provides free technical review of R packages to improve the quality of open source software in order to maximize readability, usability, usefulness, and minimize redundancy. Their peer-review process will soon be translated to Spanish and you can get involved!
  • CDSB: the Community of Bioinformatics Software Developers (CDSB in Spanish) was born in 2018 with the goal of helping Latin American R users become R & Bioconductor developers and increase the representation of Latinx in these communities. For more information about CDSB check bit.ly/cdsbpost2020.
  • RUGs: there are several R User Groups in Latin America, some of which are officially sponsored by the R Consortium. We believe that creating a welcoming space is crucial for keeping the ideas flowing, which allows for meaningful networking and, consequently, the development of new projects. We can help you start your own group!
  • R4DS in Spanish + datos package: the resources to learn R in English are many, awesome, online, and free. But in Latin America few people can afford to learn English, and the resources in Spanish are few. To help solve this problem, we community-translated to Spanish the “R for Data Science” book and developed a package with the translation of all the datasets used in it: datos. The workflow to contribute to the package was designed to engage first-time contributors, and is now guiding the development of a new version in Portuguese that will be released in the next few months.
  • #DatosDeMiércoles + #30díasdegráficos: The @R4DS_es Twitter account was created as a way to share projects like the R4DS translation and to developed initiatives to foster the Spanish-speaking R community,  like #datosdemieRcoles, the Latin American cousin of #TidyTuesday. The idea is not only to use datasets that are in Spanish, but also datasets that are relevant for our Region. This initiative has been complemented with the 30 days plot challenge #30díasdegráficos. If you want to participate proposing a dataset for #datodemiéRcoles, please visit our github repo.
  • The Carpentries: The Carpentries builds global capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. Building a sustainable and active community in Latin America includes several initiatives: lesson translations, instructor training, workshop coordination, and fundraising. Get in touch with us through the mailing list and the carpentries-es channel at the Carpentries Slack workspace.
  • ReproHack: ReproHack is a growing community for researchers that are fighting the reproducibility crisis by sharing their experiences across disciplines. It is focused on organizing hackathons where participants attempt to reproduce published research from a list of proposed papers with public code and data. We are planning the first ReproHack in Spanish for October 2020 and you can get in touch with us through Twitter.
  • AI Inclusive: AI Inclusive is an organization that promotes diversity in the AI Community. We want to bring awareness around Artificial Intelligence issues and empower the community so they can enter in the AI field, a field that is not diverse at all. In December 2019, we had our launch events in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and San Francisco, California. Follow us and join us!
  • Data Latam: in May 2016 we started with the first Data Latam podcast, aimed at offering an easy entry point, in Spanish, to those interested in data science. We always ask our interviewees: “How did you get where you are?”, and the diversity of stories has been enormous. Today Data Latam is a Latin American community of professionals and academics, who apply data science in their day to day work and we invite you to participate!

What happens in the R Community doesn’t stay in the R Community. All the good practices of inclusive and diverse communities learned in several of the initiatives presented before, generate strong work teams within and beyond the R community. There is still a lot to be done, but what we’ve already achieved is very encouraging and provides a solid foundation for the future.

These initiatives are sustained by many people making a great, mostly volunteer, effort behind the scenes. Some of the challenges that the communities face are translated into multiple positives, sustained, and a lot of invisible hard work. Some of them are: finding international funding due to limited local options, translating content, joining forces across organizations, organizing regional conferences, and becoming active developers of the technology.

The Latin American R community is growing fast and so does the responsibility to make this growth solid and safe. Some of the future work that we, as community builders, look forward to fulfilling are: consolidating regional conferences with support of international sponsors; acquiring funding to sustain translations; amplifying the voices of regional minorities; importing educational material and work opportunities; connecting expats with their local communities; helping other groups such as RUGs and RLadies; connecting with other initiatives such as R-Forwards, Africa-R, MiR, among others; Increase our and other minorities representation in the R Core Team, the R Foundation, and the R Consortium.

Thank you! Please watch our useR! 2020 video on YouTube.

R Communities in South Africa

By Blog

R Consortium interview with Dr. Heather Turner, Chair of Forwards, the R Foundation taskforce for underrepresented groups in the R Community

In January, R Consortium posted about a crowd-funding campaign for Building the R Community in Southern Africa. In February, they successfully raised £2,700 with 44 supporters in 28 days. Fantastic!

We wanted to get a mid-year update and also more details on R communities in Southern Africa so we spoke with Dr. Heather Turner, chair of Forwards, a R Foundation taskforce for underrepresented groups. Dr. Turner is a Honorary Research Fellow of the Statistics Department at the University of Warwick, UK. She brings nearly 20 years of experience with R. Recently, Dr. Turner raised money to fund several workshops and talks in order to develop the R community in South Africa. 

———————–

What were some of the interesting ways R is being used in Southern Africa?

R is being used in academia, government organisations, non-profits and businesses. It is perhaps not as common as SPSS or Python, but an enthusiastic community is growing. I was able to discover where R was being used through the people I met and the companies that hosted or supported some of the events. However, the Johannesburg satRday was my main opportunity to see how R was being used. Several of the talks had an African focus, such as Anelda van der Walt’s talk on the afrimapr project making it easier to map data by administrative regions:

Kirsty Lee Garcon’s talk on mapping African genomic data with the sf package:

And Astrid Radermacher’s talk on unravelling the mysteries of resurrection plants (specifically, a native African one) using various R packages:

Among the general R talks, I particularly enjoyed Diana Pholo’s talk “From Pythonista to Rtist”, which gave practical advice:

Drikus du Toit’s talk on SHAP: Interpreting ML Models with IML (), which looked at modelling whether a person would default on a loan.

And Roberto Bennetto’s talk on exploring the Corona outbreak with R, which, back in March 7, was one the first looks I’d had at data from the pandemic.

How has R literacy helped to empower women in areas like Johannesburg or Kampala where satRday events have been hosted?

Learning R is one way that women can unlock the power of data science. This can be directly applied to issues of gender equality as Caroline Akoth demonstrated through her talk on the work of Women in GIS, Kenya, at satRday Johannesburg.

Alternatively, it can give women the opportunity to lead the way to more open, reproducible practices, as satRday Kampala keynote Shelmith Kariuki recently demonstrated by extracting the Kenya Population and Housing Census results from PDF files and publishing them as tidy datasets in her rKenyaCensus package: https://github.com/Shelmith-Kariuki/rKenyaCensus

In general, expertise in R is a powerful skill that can help women to progress in their careers and make a difference in the world.

The satRday events play an important role in inspiring women to pursue data science and to take on responsibilities in the R community. After the satRday in Abidjan, three women joined the board of the Abidjan R Users group and they have already been active in planning and leading R training. The first satRdays in Africa were held in Cape Town and the organizing team made a concerted effort to have a strong representation of women in the program, inviting only women keynotes and proactively encouraging women to submit abstracts. This commitment to the inclusion of women has continued with the subsequent South African satRdays and has been very effective. It can be motivating for women in the audience to see women on stage; after the first Cape Town satRday, Theoni Photopoulou was inspired to start an R-Ladies group. She was joined by Megan Beckett and they co-founded R-Ladies Cape Town. Since then, there has been a symbiotic relationship between R-Ladies and satRdays in South Africa, where one helps to promote the other and both help to strengthen women’s R literacy and social networks.

The community and social network are just as important as R literacy. R-Ladies groups such as those in Cape Town and Johannesburg provide a particularly supportive space for women and gender minorities to learn R. But satRdays and regular R User Groups also help to connect women to R users outside their university or workplace. For some women, these connections have lead directly to new jobs requiring (more) R expertise. More generally, women can tap into their network to help them navigate interviews, negotiate competitive salaries and handle both technical and inter-personal issues that come up in their work.

As women learn more about R and are supported by the community, they become confident in themselves, impacting the wider community. For example, Astrid Radermacher, a co-organizer of R-Ladies Cape Town, has started to run free R classes at her institution and it is mostly women that attend. Shakirah Nakalungi, a co-organizer of the satRday in Kampala, is an ambassador for Zindi, a Kaggle-like platform focused on solving Africa’s most pressing problems. R-Ladies Johannesburg has partnered with ‘Women in Big Data’, ‘Coding Mamas’, ‘WiMLDS’ and other groups, widening their impact. In this way, women empowered by learning R pay it forward within the R community and beyond.

Your data (https://forwards.github.io/data/) shows that the average age for packet authors was approximately 39 years old. Has it been your experience that young adults find R to be daunting?

I don’t think that young adults find R to be daunting any more than older adults. The data you refer to is quite old now (from 2010); back then it was still unusual for R to be taught at undergraduate level. So most people would learn R during their postgraduate studies or later in life and it would take a few years to get to the stage where they might write a package, hence most package authors were over 25. I would expect the distribution to have shifted a little to younger ages these days, however the average age would still be relatively old, as thankfully writing an R package is not a fatal event and us older maintainers live on!

What has been the most gratifying part of putting on events like R-Ladies or satRday? The most frustrating?

The most gratifying part is people enjoying the event. It’s great when you get positive feedback or people post something online saying how they learnt something that they’re keen to try out or how they felt welcomed and supported by the folks at the event. The frustrating part is people wanting a lot more from you when you’ve volunteered to do a particular thing. On the one hand, it’s often something I would want to do and would be good at. On the other, the small asks add up and can become too much, so something has to give. This is challenging to me as a community organizer, it’s easiest to say “X is good at that, let’s ask them”, but we need to be respectful of people’s time and keep looking to bring new people in to share the work.

Do you see R being used more in Africa over the coming 3-5 years? 

Yes I do. My impression is that R is not widely taught in universities across Africa, but initiatives like eR-Biostat are helping to change that. Often students will self-learn R, or learn through a one-off workshop perhaps by a visiting lecturer or run by the Carpentries. R users that are trying to encourage others to use or learn R can face a couple of frustrating attitudes. One is that R is only used in universities and is not useful in other sectors. Another is that R is something to be feared because increased automation may make people’s jobs redundant. Such attitudes are why I think it is critical to build the community around R, with R user groups, satRdays and online networks, so that people can see the variety of ways R is used and see that increasing data science literacy can lead to more interesting, skilled work. The R community is growing in Africa and I think this in turn will encourage wider adoption of R in the next few years.

Building the R Community in Southern Africa

By Blog

By Heather Turner, Chair of Forwards, the R Foundation taskforce for underrepresented groups in the R Community

In this post I will give the background to the Forwards Southern Africa 2020 project, for which we are running a crowd-funding campaign until February 5, 2020.

On March 6-7, 2020, Johannesburg will host the fourth satRday to be held in South AfricasatRdays are community-led, regional conferences, that support collaboration, networking and innovation within the R community. They were initiated by an R Consortium funded project, that ran pilot events in Budapest and Cape Town in 2016/2017. The conference series has been expanding around the world since then, with ten events in 2019.

For Joburg satRday 2020, I was invited to be a keynote speaker. As chair of Forwards, the R Foundation taskforce for underrepresented groups, I saw this as an opportunity to create an initiative focused on building the R Community in Southern Africa.

A first step was to offer a workshop on R package development, using the materials developed under the R Consortium project, Forwards Workshops for Women and Girls. This project ran package development workshops for women in New Zealand, Budapest and Chicago. Since there are still some funds left in the grant, we are able to offer some scholarships to women in Africa to attend the Joburg workshop and satRday. Women with visa-free access to South Africa may apply; the deadline for applications is midnight SAST, January 31.

The next step was to look beyond South Africa, to neighbouring countries. The following map shows cities in Africa with R-Ladies groups (purple), R User Groups (blue) or both (blue-grey):

The AfricaR consortium that took off at the start of 2019 has really helped to support the R community across Africa and has lead to the founding of several R User Groups, as well as the first satRday in East Africa (Kampala 2019) and the first satRday in West Africa which will take place in Abidjan, February 1, 2020. In Southern Africa, there are strong R User Groups and R-Ladies groups in both Cape Town and Johannesburg, but the R Community is only just starting to go beyond South Africa, with the establishment of Eswatini useRs last year.

UPDATE: The Adidjan satRday event was a big success! Here’s a photo of the full group. Videos of the talks should be available online soon.

The Forwards Southern Africa Project aims to build on this foundation, by organizing free workshops and meetups in collaboration with local partners in Eswatini, Botswana and Namibia. This project is also supported by the WhyR Foundation and AfricaR. The details of the events are still being finalised, but the planned itinerary is as follows:

Windhoek, Namibia (March 4, 2020, TBC)

In partnership with the Department of Statistics and Population Studies, University of Namibia:

  • Introduction to R for data analysis workshop (1 day)
  • Launch event of the first R User Group in Namibia

Manzini, Eswatini (March 11-12, 2020)

In partnership with the recently established Eswatini useR group. Registration is open for this 2 day event, that includes:

  • Introduction to R for data analysis workshop (1 day)
  • Data visualization workshop (1/2 day)
  • Meetup including talk on the R community and resources available for newcomers

Gaborone, Botswana (March 14, 2020)

In partnership with WiMLDS Gaborone and PyData Botswana:

  • Introduction to R workshop (1/2 day)

All these events can be supported via the crowdfunder where further updates will be posted. Updates will also be shared on the Forwards Twitter.

R Community Explorer

By Blog

by Ben Ubah, Claudia Vitolo and Rick Pack

Introduction

One of the most important qualities of the R Language is its thriving community. The R community has a reputation for being particularly friendly, welcoming and cohesive, which has enhanced its adoption and expansion. R user groups have accordingly flourished, especially in recent years.

In this year’s Google Summer of Code program, the proposal, “Data-Driven Exploration of the R Community” was selected. For this, the project’s developer, Ben Ubah, thanks the project’s mentors, Claudia Vitolo and Rick Pack for their contributions.

The primary motivation for this project was the need to have a consistent, data-driven, automated dashboard that provides a broad overview of global R User Groups and R-Ladies Groups.

The R Consortium and other stakeholders have invested in community expansion and sustenance initiatives like R-Ladies, R User Group Support (RUGS) program, Event Sponsorship, RCDI-WG and SatRdays.These promote the learning and adoption of R in many under-represented regions. They have also significantly enhanced community engagement.

As the R community has progressed, there does not appear to have arisen a way to track its global user groups’ inception and activity. Is there a way to find out which regions require more representation? How do we recognize the efforts of organizers who put in a lot of effort to organize events that sustain user groups? How do we easily locate and recognize the most active groups and perhaps learn from their successes? Could we somehow ascertain the impact of the initiatives set by the R Consortium and others on a global scale? Could there be a unified platform dedicated to exploring the R community in an open-ended curiosity-driven fashion? These were the thoughts that inspired this project.

While this project is in its infancy, we have started seeing some encouraging results after the first coding phase of Google Summer of Code. It is our hope to share with you what we have achieved so far and receive welcomed feedback, if you are so inclined.

R-Ladies Groups

Since the R Consortium first funded the R-Ladies initiative, there has been a sporadic diffusion of their chapters and members globally. Perhaps partially as a result of having a consistent leadership compositon and funding, R-Ladies groups are mostly managed on meetup.com, and share a common naming convention. This makes it quite easy to find them on meetup.com and explore their data from the meetup API.

Chart showing Growth of R-Ladies Groups over the years

In the first phase of Google Summer of Code, this project explored a way to track R-Ladies Groups globally from the meetup API, using the meetupr package developed by R-Ladies.

This exploration was intended to be completely data-driven, automated but rendered via a static dashboard that would be hosted via GitHub Pages. R-Ladies already have a shiny dashboard, which only runs on a Shiny Server. Inspired by that dashboard, we developed one with some useful differences such as faster loading, additional aesthetic features such as thematic coloring, and additional tabular displays, charts and counts.

What Has Been Achieved

For the R-Ladies dashboard, the following were achieved:

  1. We used the meetupr package to extract R-Ladies Chapters from Meetup.com
  2. Improved the existing find_groups() and get_events() functions in meetupr to meet our requirements
  3. Transformed the data from Meetup to required formats
  4. Persisted the data on GitHub
  5. Developed a static HTML dashboard interface based on open-source Bootstrap template.
  6. Rendered the persisted data via the dashboard interface.
  7. Automated the process
  8. Deployed it via GitHub Pages

The Tools We Used

To accomplish the following, we used a mix of the tools listed below:

  1. R, RStudio and the following packages: meetupr, curl, jsonlite and leafletR
  2. Javascript and the following libraries jquery.js, d3.js, echarts.js, leaflet.js and lodash.js
  3. Gentelella Admin Dashboard Bootstrap HTML template
  4. Travis CI to build the project, execute R scripts and bash commands
  5. Bash commands to call R scripts and commit modified files to GitHub

How We Achieved it

  1. We used the meetupr package to retrieve R-Ladies Groups from meetup.com with an R script.
  2. We further analyzed this data and computed several summaries out of it. We used the leafletR package to transform our data frame to GeoJSON. We used this GeoJSON file to create a leaflet map using leaflet.js. In this map, R-Ladies groups are separated into three groups with markers of three color categories: Active (purple), Inactive (dark-purple), and Unbegun (orange). Active groups have had an event in the past 180 days or have an upcoming event in the future. Inactive groups have not had an event in the past 180 days and do not have an upcoming event. Unbegun groups have not had an event in the past and none are planned for the future.
  3. Persisted all data and our summaries in CSV / JSON files. After each Travis build, the data and our summaries gets updated straight from the Meetup API.
  4. We wrote bash commands to run our R scripts, and commit updated CSV / JSON files to GitHub after every Travis build.
  5. We setup Travis Cron Jobs, to build this project daily and update our data.
  6. We then, customized the Gentelella Admin Dashboard Bootstrap HTML template to our requirements.
  7. Rendered our summaries via widgets on this dashboard. Used Javascript/libraries to perform other simpler summaries and produce maps, charts and tables.

The Result

At the end we have an open-source dynamic dashboard for R-Ladies that is updated daily, but is built to be static and hosted via GitHub Pages. This could be seen as another approach to building information dashboards with R as a back-end technology, maintaining separation of business data-processing from data-presentation.

At the time of writing, there are 165 R-Ladies chapters composed of 50,000 + members, across 47 countries, 162 cities, with more than 1,580past events and many upcoming. 71% of R-Ladies chapters are active, 13% are inactive, and 16% are unbegun. Unbegun groups have members but have not started organizing events yet. Our observation is that members are added to the R-Ladies community daily.

The pop-up markers in the leaflet map display important information about each R-Ladies chapter including a link to the group’s webpage, number of events, status, inactive months, and how to become an organizer for inactive/unbegun groups.

Feedback

We are just starting this project and are in hopes of expanding its reach far beyond its current state. We would love to hear from you if you have any ideas or find issues. Feel free to Follow / Star the project at its GitHub repo: https://github.com/benubah/r-community-explorer/

Next

We have started working on general R user-groups and plan to report our progress soon with some lessons we have learned.