We are pleased to announce the release of our new Code of Conduct. rOpenSci’s community is our best asset and it’s important that we put strong mechanisms in place before we have to act on a report. As before, our Code applies equally to members of the rOpenSci team and to anyone from the community at large participating in in-person or online activities. What’s new? A Code of Conduct Committee: Stefanie Butland (rOpenSci Community Manager), Scott Chamberlain (rOpenSci Co-founder and Technical Lead) and Kara Woo (independent community member).

Why vitae? The process of maintaining a CV can be tedious. It’s a task I often forget about - that is until someone requests it and I find that my latest is woefully out of date. To make matters worse, these professional updates often need repeating across variety of sites (such as ORCID and LinkedIn). Having seen several CVs put together into an R Markdown document (including my own, featuring a few quick and dirty hacks to make it work), the need for an R package was obvious.

In late November 2018, we ran the third annual rOpenSci ozunconf. This is the sibling rOpenSci unconference, held in Australia. We ran the first ozunconf in Brisbane in 2016, and the second in Melbourne in 2017. Photos taken by Ajay from Fotoholics As usual, before the unconf, we started discussion on GitHub issue threads, and the excitement was building with the number of issues. The day before the unconf we ran “Day 0 training” - an afternoon explaining R packages and GitHub.

The Ecology Hackathon Almost one year ago now, ecologists filled a room for the “Ecology Hackathon: Developing R Packages for Accessing, Synthesizing and Analyzing Ecological Data” that was co-organised by rOpenSci Fellow, Nick Golding and Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This hackathon was part of the “Ecology Across Borders” Joint Annual Meeting 2017 of BES, GfÖ, NecoV, and EEF in Ghent. At different tables, different people joined each other to work on different ideas to implement as R packages.

I never really thought I would write an R package. I use R pretty casually. Then, this year, I was invited to participate during the last week of the Analytical Paleobiology short course, an intensive month-long experience in quantitative paleontology. I was thrilled to be invited. But I got a slight sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized all the materials were in R. And so I, a Pythonista, decided I would spend some of my maternity leave writing R packages to try to blend in with students who had spent the month living and breathing R.