RForwards

About RForwards

The task force was set up by the R Foundation in December 2015 to address the underrepresentation of women and rebranded in January 2017 to accommodate more under-represented groups such as LGBT, minority ethnic groups, and people with disabilities in the R community.

The members of the task force were invited to participate based on their interest in routing for specific under-represented groups and their contributions in the area of diversity and inclusion, to reflect different genders, ethnic groups, work contexts, career stages and aspects of the R project (e.g. CRAN and Bioconductor). The task force is organised as a core team plus a number of sub-teams that focus on particular tasks as outlined below:

• Accessibility: Working to improve access to R materials for people with low vision, blindness, hard of hearing, deaf, and other disabilities.

• Community: General outreach to help people from under-represented groups get into R and develop as useRs.

• Conferences: Focusing on R Foundation conferences, liaising with organizers/program committee on policies and inclusion initiatives.

• On-ramps: Creating paths for useRs to develop their skills and make contributions to the R/BioConductor package ecosystem.

• Social Media: Posting to Twitter and/or Facebook, soliciting blog posts and publishing them, maintaining website.

• Surveys: Running and analysing community surveys, packaging up data and tools and maintaining the Data page

My role

In 2020 with a group of peaple from Latinamerica, started to developed a survey to know the R community in the region. In the process I became part of the Surveys team where I also help to run the anually useR! surveys.