Danielle Smalls-Perkins & Dorris Scott | Reflections on creating the Mi-R community | RStudio
Full title: Your R is My R too: Reflections on creating the Mi-R community While the R community has made strides in increasing the representation and participation for women and users from underrepresented regions, there are still members of the R community that have expressed desires for a more inclusive space in addition to these strides. In addition, there are unique challenges that underrepresented R users experience in their respective workspaces or academic environments. In late February of 2020, Danielle Smalls-Perkins and Dorris Scott created Mi-R (Minorities in R) as a result of their various experiences both in and outside the R community. The purpose of this talk is to reflect on the challenges, highlights, and future directions of the first six months since the creation of Mi-R. About Danielle: Danielle Smalls-Perkins co-founded MiR Community with the hope that the R community would continue to encourage the inclusion and recognition of contributions made from R users of diverse backgrounds. She loves to use R for understanding and storytelling. Danielle currently works as a Senior Strategist in Google's Trust and Safety Team. She advocates for model fairness, interpretability, and reducing harmful outcomes of algorithmic decision-making on vulnerable populations. About Dorris: Dorris Scott is the GIS Librarian and Social Science Data Curator at Washington University – St. Louis, where she provides consultation on projects that use geospatial data along with providing training in various GIS software, programming applications of geospatial data, and data management. She also serves as a liaison between Washington University Libraries and social science departments assisting faculty with their data needs such as data management and data curation. Dorris received her PhD in Geography from the University of Georgia, with a specialization in GIS applications for public health
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi everyone. My name is Danielle Smalls-Perkins. And my name is Dorris Scott. And we are the co-founders of Mi-R Community. Today, during this lighting talk, we're going to reflect a little bit on Mi-R Community this past year and also invite you to join some of the efforts that we plan to carry out in the next year.
I'll first start with the hope for Mi-R. So the hope for Mi-R is to promote the visibility and leadership of our users from marginalized races, genders, the LGBTQ community, and the disabled community through community led efforts that support professional development. Right now, we have slightly under 200 members and allies within our community Slack from different countries, backgrounds, experiences, and all flavors of data people, data scientists, data analysts, etc. All these folks are willing to share their unique perspectives and their love of R.
Highlights from the first year
So some of the highlights from this past year really, first, of course, is just getting the group off the ground and starting to see people roll in. We started right as the pandemic hit the entire world and try to garner support and momentum just as the U.S. was going through a racial reckoning excuse me, a racial reckoning for racial justice. So to see the outpouring of support, Allison Horst designed logo and graphics for us to see other members join and support each other and lead new initiatives. That's just been truly special.
Another huge highlight of this past year were the webinars held by our community members. So Dan Ramson led a webinar focused on some of the new features in the recently updated dplyr and then some of his favorite functions associated with that library. Also, Shell Karuki provided a webinar focused on g2plot2 and shared some of her tips and tricks when doing data visualization. We also had an RStudio instructor certification panel led by Greg Wilson, Shell Karuki, Janina, Bellini, Sabine, in which they talked about the process to become an RStudio certified instructor and we've also been having some study sessions every month for those that are preparing to take the exam to become an RStudio certified instructor. So those are some of the top highlights.
I will now pass it to Doris to share a couple more reflections.
Reflections and looking ahead
I have a lot of reflections on how our first year went as an organization, but for the sake of time, I will just share only one reflection. We originally created MyR because we wanted to create a space in which people who did not see themselves in the data science community could come together. We hoped that MyR would extend past our ability to adequately support all of the intersectional backgrounds that are in the community, and indeed it has. We are so grateful for members of our community who provide their unique perspectives, insights, knowledge, and skills. Thank you so much for all that you bring to our community.
We hoped that MyR would extend past our ability to adequately support all of the intersectional backgrounds that are in the community, and indeed it has.
In 2021, we are working on several endeavors. We don't want to give away our full lineup, so here's a preview of what's to come. We are currently working on endeavors to ensure that MyR webinars are accessible to MyR members with disabilities, along with the wider community of R users with disabilities, and we are working on a Tidy Tuesday event in which we will focus on best practices to make our visualizations more accessible. In addition, we intend to have more professional development workshops, such as resume workshops and interview preparedness, along with a digital security webinar for researchers sharing their work with the public.
So if you identify as an underrepresented R user, then we invite you to join MyR community as a member, and if you'd like to support the community but don't necessarily identify as an underrepresented R user, then we would love to have you join as an ally in support of the members. You can find us on Twitter and YouTube at MyR community, and you can also visit us at www.myrcommunity.com. Thanks so much for listening to our talk. Thank you.
