- Mission Statement: increasing female representation in global R community in every role, from learners to leaders, through establishing local communities providing mentorship, collaborative learning & support.
- Accessibility: Provision of FREE events based on a combination of volunteering and funding/sponsorship where available
- No commercial agenda: groups to operate to achieve stated social goals of the R-Ladies community/project, and can be supported by corporation where goals are mutually, but NOT ‘used’ by corporation/as a commercial vehicle for private aims
- Org Structure & Legal Entities:
- Overview of R Consortium Proposal & Project Goals:
- Relationship between local groups & global framework, e.g., project finance
- Web presence:
- Website: http://www.rladies.org
- E-mail: info@rladies.org
- Twitter: RLadiesGlobal
- Slack: http://r-ladies.slack.com
- GitHub: http://github.com/rladies
- Global directory of female R practitioners / speakers: https://rladies.org/ladies/
- You can get your personal email name@rladies.org and one for your chapter, e.g., boston@rladies.org, which forwards to all organisers of a chapter. Erin (erin@rladies.org) can create those for you.
- Set-up in an email client: see wiki
- Currently meetup.com accounts are self-funded, but we are waiting to get a grant from the R-Consortium. We have been sharing accounts so that we can put three meetups on one account for the same price, or rather, someone who is paying $15/mo for a meetup.com account sets up three groups under their account (that’s the limit). Ask in the #new_chapters channel on Slack if anybody has any groups left on their account. We are trying to cluster groups geographically.
- Form a group on the meetup.com site with the name “R-Ladies [your location]”, for example: “R-Ladies San Francisco” or “R-Ladies London”. (Note: capital “L” for the Ladies)
- Modify the URL of the meetup.com to be: meetup.com/rladies-your-location (lower-case, without the dash between r & ladies)
- If you are setting up a group for a different chapter: you can make the local organiser a "co-organiser" of the meetup once they have joined the group.
- Local Twitter handle (optional) should also use the @RLadiesLocation format, for example: @RLadiesSF and @RLadiesLondon, with the same name as the meetup.com group name (above).
- There is a global organisation to which you can add repositories as needed. Contact any of the admins (e.g., @hannah) of the GitHub organisation to be added as a member.
- Local GitHub organisation (optional) should also use the “R-Ladies [your location]” format for the organisation name, for example: “R-Ladies San Francisco” or “R-Ladies London”, and “rladies-your-location” for the URL.
- To join the global Slack please send an e-mail to slack@rladies.org.
- Please add your city or chapter to your Slack profile.
- You can create a channel on the global Slack for communication within your chapter, e.g., #rladies-san-francisco.
Different ideas:
- Kickoff/Meet & Greet: Present your vision/idea for the meetup, invite others to help organise.
- Lightning talks: Short talks of 5 minutes on a range of topics. This format usually also has a low barrier to participate.
- Survey: Some chapters have set up an online questionnaire before their first meeting to find out what people were looking for in the meetup. Here are examples from Paris and Madrid.
- Making your group/event known: you can reach out to some other meetups in the area which might have overlapping audiences (e.g., data science meetup and R user groups) and universities (e.g., statistics departments).
- Finding co-organisers: Some chapters have found their organising team at the launch event, others have included a question on who would be interested in organising in the initial survey.
- Deciding on desired/feasible frequency of events (once a month, once every few months?)
- Appropriate event formats depending on profile of the local community. More academic, more industry? Talks, tutorials, lightning talks, drop-in sessions, socials? Working through online courses together?
- How to find venues to host meetups (for free!)
- How to find speakers
- Hot to find material: online courses, material developed by other R-Ladies (should in future go on the GitHub organisation)
- How to find sponsors for refreshments
- Event registration, management and data collection
- How to use Eventbrite to manage meetup attendance & data collection (or any equivalent local available platforms) - meetup is quite limited for managing events
- Set up Google Analytics on your meetup to collect data
- How to create R-Ladies Database
- Advertising, Publicity and Event Discovery: Twitter, LinkedIn, Eventbrite etc. (i.e., popular marketing channels and platforms in your area); Database (once developed!)
Deciding on and enforcing a local variation of the global recommended position as is appropriate for the specific community: Individuals who identify as women can be leaders, mentors, and members/attendees, others are welcome to attend as event guests.
To go on GitHub (all is under development or future work)
- Starter Kit
- Training material
- Speakers directory
- R Circles, i.e., sub-communities based on vocation/industry. How to encourage hubs of R-Ladies with specific interests to connect and collaborate, e.g., academic research, specific sciences, health, marketing, finance etc.
- Co-hosting with other meetup groups, e.g., local PyLadies
- Recording events and posting presentations to R-Ladies Global site and/or other places on the web
- Finding and attracting local volunteers to join leadership team
- Finding and attracting ‘supporters/facilitators’ of your group (individuals who will promote/RT, help you develop local partnerships with their contacts/orgs etc. but may not be appropriate as leadership team member or participant)
- E-mail templates for contacting venues, potential sponsors, or responding to claims of guys that they are being discriminated against, etc.
- Branding: How to use global R-Ladies inventory, e.g., logo, T-shirts