Karthik Ram is a Data Scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Berkeley Institute for Global Change Biology. He is a co-founder of rOpenSci, a collective to support the development of R-based tools which facilitate open science and access to open data. In this interview, Karthik and I discuss the birth of rOpenSci, tools and life hacks for staying sane while managing the constant stress of work fires and the importance of saying no.

Join our Community Call on Tuesday, January 30th (January 31 for our Australian friends) Nick Golding, 2017 rOpenSci Fellow, will talk about two R packages he has developed recently. zoon aims to promote open and reproducible research in ecological modeling by helping researchers share their code in a modular way and produce reproducible research artifacts. Nick has recently been trying to bootstrap a community around this idea and says this is a much harder problem.

Jenny Bryan @JennyBryan is a Software Engineer at RStudio and is on leave from being an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. Jenny serves in leadership positions with rOpenSci and Forwards and as an Ordinary member of The R Foundation. KO: What is your name, your title, and how many years have you worked in R? JB: I’m Jenny Bryan, I am a software engineer at RStudio (still getting used to that title).

Introduction When I was in grad school at Emory, I had a favorite desk in the library. The desk wasn’t particularly cozy or private, but what it lacked in comfort it made up for in real estate. My books and I needed room to operate. Students of the ancient world require many tools, and when jumping between commentaries, lexicons, and interlinears, additional clutter is additional “friction”, i.e., lapses in thought due to frustration.

I’ve raved about the value of extending a personalized welcome to new community members and I recently shared six tips for running a successful hackathon-flavoured unconference. Building on these, I’d like to share the specific approach and (free!) tools I used to help prepare new rOpenSci community members to be productive at our unconference. My approach was inspired directly by my AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program (AAAS-CEFP) training. Specifically, 1) one mentor said that the most successful conference they ever ran involved having one-to-one meetings with all participants prior to the event, and 2) prior to our in-person AAAS-CEFP training, we completed an intake questionnaire that forced us to consider things like “what do you hope to get out of this” and “what do you hope to contribute”.