Maya Gans | Starting an R Book Club: Cooking Up Friendships in Isolation | RStudio
Amidst a global pandemic there’s been one consistency in my life: every Tuesday a group of friends meet to discuss Hadley Wickham’s Advanced R. I crowdsourced interest using the R4DS Slack and the results were magical: a group of incredibly curious and generous people motivated to learn and teach one another emerged. The meetings evolved from a group of strangers giving timid presentations to a safe space where we share and improve upon personal applications. The 1 club has grown to 3 regional cohorts, and became a model for discussing other books too. This talk will go over the structure of our meetings in hopes of empowering others to start their own book clubs, showcasing a different way people can create and engage in communities. About Maya: I am a mycologist turned data scientist. I love statistics, data visualization, and all things JavaScript. I am currently an intern at RStudio designing a visual block-based programming language. I create music-related infographics for JamBase.com. When I’m not coding, I’m climbing tall mountains
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi, my name is Maya Gans, and in this talk, I want to tell you how to start your own virtual book club. So this idea came to me in the beginning of lockdown, I found myself feeling really alone. And also scrolling through Twitter, I saw everyone taking on these new exciting hobbies. Like remember the time when there were so many pictures of sourdough. So I was looking at my bookshelf, and I saw Advanced R. And I realized that's a book that I use as a reference, but I never read cover to cover. So I wanted to use the lockdown opportunity to do that. And I found myself asking a lot of questions that I didn't have the answers to. So I reached out to John Harmon, the moderator of the R for Data Science Slack channel. And he allowed me to start a book club channel within that Slack and to kind of just see what happens. And the results were magical. 12 of us ended up meeting weekly for the entirety of the book. So I think over the course of 25 weeks, and we went from essentially a group of strangers to now a group of really good friends.
Why the book club worked
So first, I want to talk about the cornerstones of why I think that this worked. And the reasons are twofold. We created a microcosm within an already existing community. So you might say there's already R ladies or other chapters and groups out there. And that's true. But that's thousands of faceless group members who, albeit, are extremely helpful and inviting. Whereas this group was 12 of us meeting on Zoom with the camera on and really humanizing this learning experience with each other. The other component was that we made this as asynchronous compatible as possible. So each meeting was recorded and put on YouTube. So if you couldn't attend, you can watch that. But we also had this Slack channel for people to ask questions and even answer them whenever they get to them. So you weren't really limited in lockdown to this single hour.
Now, the meetings themselves kind of changed over time what we did with them. In the beginning, we took the first 30 or so minutes to review what we found in the chapter, and then use the rest of the time to answer questions. But after a couple weeks, maybe around week eight or so, I was getting kind of bored with this model. And I wanted to make an application. I made a Shiny app that uses the concepts within a chapter. And granted, this Shiny app was super buggy, didn't even work. But within the hour, we all debugged it together and got it up and running. And I think that was kind of a paradigm shift where people started, rather than just relaying information, they showed us their packages or other creations. And it was incredibly inspiring and eye-opening to see how people are using these fundamentals in these chapters.
And it was incredibly inspiring and eye-opening to see how people are using these fundamentals in these chapters.
The secret sauce
So now let's get to the secret sauce of why I think this model worked, right? We're not the first people to make a book club. And I think it's because of two things. One is that we have a facilitator for each of our books. And in this case, it was me, who, granted, I'm pretty extroverted, and I was totally fine pinging people on Slack and being like, hey, it's Thursday night, time to meet. But you don't have to be that pushy. Rather, the point of the facilitator is that every week, there is an agenda. And if no one is able to give that presentation for that week, then the onus is on the presenter to take that upon themselves, or else the book might kind of like falter to the wayside.
The other component is collaborative infrastructure. And for our case, we use GitHub. And this image, as well as the text before this, are links. So feel free to go out to our GitHub. But our GitHub is three folders. The first is our presentations. So the actual markdown presentations from each week. The second folder contains a bookdown of all the questions and answers collated from the Slack channel, so that you don't have to sift through that. And the last folder is a data folder. And in this folder, we kind of took that concept of applications and took a dataset and drilled down into it, where each chapter, we applied that to this dataset of our own.
Side dishes: unexpected learnings
Now, to talk about side dishes. So when we started this book club, at the outset, the goal was essentially learn the contents of the chapters. But we ended up learning all of these external things, as well. So I personally onboarded people onto how to use GitHub in a collaborative sense and collaborate on a single project. We also learned a lot about our markdown, HTML and CSS. And lastly, and maybe even most importantly, we were still leveling up on our presentation skills in these times where we're all isolated and alone.
The recipe card
So I want to leave you now with a recipe card, essentially, to recreate this recipe that worked for us. And the recipe here is kind of, I broke it down into seven steps. The first is pick a book. What book do you want to learn? The second is find an online community to make this as asynchronous as possible. The third is to blast it on social media. The fourth is some books are, you know, have natural breaks that might not be the chapters, so you might chop them into segments that are logical breaks. And then, you know, take a pulse on the group and on yourself and see what's working in that precious hour that you're meeting together. And don't be afraid to switch it up. Then lastly, I think it was really awesome and fun that we utilized applications of the chapter rather than just keeping it theoretical. And of course, in the end, have fun. So there's a link to the Slack channel here because I would really like, if you are going to create a book club, to just let us know what works and what didn't. And thank you so much for listening to this talk.
