Champions Program

Research software should serve everyone in our communities, which means it needs to be sustainable, open, and built by and for all groups. Currently, however, there is a dismaying lack of diversity in open source communities in general and the R / research software community in particular. Developers in the R community are overwhelmingly white, male, and from a handful of countries. That disappointing lack of diversity is potentially detrimental to the sustainability, utility and productivity of projects.

The rOpenSci Champions Program is for people from historically and systematically excluded groups who are interested in contributing to rOpenSci and the broader open source and open science communities.

The rOpenSci Champion Program is part of a series of activities and projects we are carrying out to ensure our research software serves everyone in our communities and is supported through a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The program is a 12-month-long program that includes onboarding, cohort-based training, one-on-one mentorship, cohort meetings, project development, outreach activities, assessment, and offboarding. After training, Champions develop their project. Projects may involvebuilding a new package or going through the peer review process as an author or a reviewer. As the concluding activity of the training, champions choose at least one of several outreach options to perform, which include giving a presentation, writing a blog post, or organizing a peer group in their community. Some of our cohorts are language and geographic region-specific.