Three members of the rOpenSci team - Scott Chamberlain, Jenny Bryan, and Rich FitzJohn - as well as many community members will give talks at useR!2019. Many other package authors, maintainers, reviewers and unconf participants will be there too. Don’t hesitate to ask them about rOpenSci packages, software peer review, community, or just say hello if you’re looking for a friendly face. We’ve listed their talks for you. Search the schedule for details.

rOpenSci HQ 👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 🏗️ Join our next Community Call on Involving Multilingual Communities June 28th. Video of our Community Call on Security for R is up, with a long list of resources. Our Community Manager, Stefanie Butland, spoke at R-Ladies Seattle and Fred Hutch about rOpenSci, Learning R, and Building Community May 22nd. Software Peer Review ✔ 6 community-contributed packages passed software peer review nbaR - R Package Client for the Netherlands Biodiversity API Author: Hannes Hettling Issue: ropensci/onboarding#257 Reviewers: Dom Bennett Max Joseph git2rdata - Store and Retrieve Data.

rOpenSci’s community is increasingly international and multilingual. While we have operated primarily in English, we now receive submissions of packages from authors whose primary language is not. As we expand our community in this way, we want to learn from the experience of other organizations. How can we manage our peer-review process and open-source projects to be welcoming to non-native English speakers? Our guest speakers will include: Rayna Harris, who has co-led work with The Carpentries in internationalization of curricula.

Software is maintained by people. While software can in theory live on indefinitely, to do so requires people. People change jobs, move locations, retire, and unfortunately die sometimes. When a software maintainer can no longer maintain a package, what happens to the software? Because of the fragility of people in software, in an ideal world a piece of software should have as many maintainers as possible. Increasing maintainers increases the so-called bus factor.

We’ve been following rOpenSci’s work for a long time, and we use several packages on a daily basis for our scientific projects, especially taxize to clean species names, rredlist to extract species IUCN statuses or [treeio](many probs with this post) to work with phylogenetic trees. rOpensci is a perfect incarnation of a vibrant and diverse community where people learn and develop new ideas, especially regarding scientific packages. We’ve also noticed how much the thorough review process improves the quality of the packages that join the rOpenSci ecosystem.