rOpenSci Introduces Monthly Social Coworking and Office Hours

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting monthly social coworking + office hours sessions via Zoom, starting September 7th!

Coworking is a great way to be productive and reduce feelings of social isolation (especially important over the last year)!

These sessions will give you the opportunity to

• Meet other package developers and rOpenSci staff
• Cowork independently on work related to R (and perhaps focus on work that often gets neglected)
• Get answers to your questions

We will host sessions on the first Tuesday of each month, alternating times to accommodate different parts of the world. Come for the full 2 hrs or only as long as you need!

Our first two sessions take place Tuesday September 7th 2021 9-11am American Pacific time hosted by Steffi LaZerte and Tuesday October 5th 2021 9-11am Australian Western time hosted by Nick Tierney.

🔗 Format

We’ll be following the format we developed during our experimental label-athons:

1. We start with introductions, giving everyone a chance to socialize and network before getting down to business
2. We work for 30min either in a Quiet or Noisy room
   • Mix and match as you like
   • ‘Noisy’ room is for discussing problems, asking questions, and chatting
3. We have 5-min breaks with fun scavenger hunts to get you up and moving
4. Repeat! We’ll do a total of 3x 30min work blocks each separated by a 5-min break
5. Wrap up, a chance to share what we did and say good bye

🔗 Building on our successful Label-athon experiment

In case you missed it, as a follow up to the community call Set Up Your Package to Foster a Community, this past spring and summer we experimented with hosting four coworking label-athon events on Zoom.

During these events, participants introduced themselves and shared what they wanted to work on. We had two Zoom rooms, a quiet work room and a ’noisy’ chat room, where we could socialize, ask questions, or discuss our work.

In line with the theme of the community call, we encouraged participants to work on making their packages more contributor friendly, such as labelling issues to invite contributions, or creating road maps. However, this wasn’t a requirement for participation and many people worked on other things such as general package development and organization, research and planning for future development, setting up personal GitHub READMEs and preparing useR! 2021 presentations.

We set up a work-flow to identify rOpenSci packages with issues labelled “help wanted”, so we can tweet anything that came out of the coworking events.

We had quite an international turn out, with 3-8 participants per event from 12 countries. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with participants enjoying the opportunity to work on neglected projects, ask questions about package development, meet other devs and participate in the fun scavenger hunts 😸

These were a few of their favorite things:

• “The vibe. Welcoming, friendly, and down-to-business.”
• “It was nice to be accountable and have friends around …”
• "[The organizers] “…did a great job creating a welcoming environment and helping normalize that non-coding work, like documentation, is a valuable part of software development."
• “Hearing what other people were working on. Being able to ask questions. A sense of community.”

Come join us!