Shannon Pileggi - Balancing Global Infrastructure and Local Autonomy: Lessons from R-Ladies Global
As a global non-profit established in 2016, R-Ladies has more than 100k members from 233 chapters in 63 countries to support the mission of increasing gender diversity in the R community. Empowering local chapters is challenging as accessibility and awareness of communication methods, software choices, social platforms, and support avenues vary internationally. Join us for insights into our journey of developing a global, technical, and social infrastructure while fostering collaboration and growth and granting chapters the freedom to tailor their activities to local contexts. Walk away with practical, technical, and social strategies to empower and diversify your own data science communities based on learning from continuous feedback. Talk by Shannon Pileggi Slides: https://github.com/rladies/rladies_global_presentations/blob/master/20240813_positconf/posit_conf2024.pdf GitHub Repo: https://github.com/rladies/rladies_global_presentations/blob/master/20240813_positconf/README.md
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
My name is Shannon Pileggi, and I am on the R-Ladies leadership team. I was not scheduled to give this presentation today, so Avery Giudici was scheduled to give this presentation, and unfortunately, she could not attend last minute.
What I'm going to be talking to you about today is how we operate as a global team, as a global organization in R-Ladies. I'm going to talk to you about how we think about infrastructure for that global organization, especially in the context of the diverse needs of our community.
I'm going to start off by showing you a challenge that we face as an organization, kind of help you learn a little bit more about why that's a challenge for us and how we addressed it with new infrastructure.
The challenge: who belongs in R-Ladies?
So here's the challenge that we faced. I saw this quote on social media. I was still trying to make up my mind on whether to get in touch with the R-Ladies community. If someone called me a lady, I would last, but it seems to be inclusive.
To understand why this is a problem for us, you have to understand more about our community.
R-Ladies is a worldwide organization that promotes gender diversity in our community via meetups and mentorship in a friendly and safe environment. And I want to pause here and be explicit about what gender diversity means to us. Gender diversity is not just promoting the work of a cis woman like myself and a group of cis men. Gender diversity also includes individuals that are trans men, trans women, non-binary, and agender, and that is not an exhaustive list.
We have over 200 R-Ladies chapters across the world. We are city-based chapters. And since the very first event was hosted in 2012, we've had over 4,000 R-Ladies events to create this community and promote our work.
The R-Ladies organization
We have a leadership team. There's five of us. Riva from Chile, Avery from the United States, myself from the United States, Mo from Norway, and Johnny from Argentina.
We call ourselves a leadership team, but we're really the people on the paperwork. We've signed the paperwork. We're on the board of directors for the actual nonprofit organization. We do things like strategic planning, finances, fundraising, operational and infrastructure management, and reporting and documentation. Because, you know, I thought to myself, filing my own personal taxes is so much fun, I want to find a way to do it twice this year.
Beyond that, the five of us consider ourselves part of a larger global team. The global team achieves a lot. We do website, code of conduct adherence, community Slack management, email management, abstract review system, onboarding of new chapters, chapter mentoring, directory management, Meetup Pro, blog, conferences, social media, campaigns, translation. Our contribution working group runs all of that. Our contribution working group runs grant administration and the R Consortium ISC board. We need a lot of people to support all of these activities, and we're so grateful for the global team.
Beyond that, we have our city-based chapters that are led by chapter organizers who also pour an immense amount of time and energy into the organization by organizing meetups and by securing speakers, and by understanding what their local cities need in order to thrive. And then we have our community members who attend our chapter events, who also pour time and energy into the organization by attending events, by sharing their knowledge, by learning from others, and by becoming speakers.
Technical and social infrastructure
Managing all of this requires an enormous amount of infrastructure, or I should say supporting all of this.
And we think about our infrastructure in two buckets. We have our technical infrastructure, which are our tools, our software, and our platforms. And we also have our social infrastructure, which is our guidelines and resources. Think about documentation that tells you how to get things done and who to ask for for help.
Together, our technical infrastructure and our social infrastructure are what enable community participation and development of personal connections.
Pathways to inclusion
Of course, none of the infrastructure matters if we don't have people. So how do we get people? There's a blog post from 2022 that outlined pathways to inclusion in a community. We start off with awareness. I've heard of this thing. Understanding. I understand what this is about. Identification. I can see myself doing this. Access. I can physically, logistically, and financially do this. Belonging. I feel like I fit in here. And ownership. I care enough to take responsibility for this. I can tell you for me personally, it took me about seven years to go on this pathway.
We can also think about how our infrastructure supports this pathway to inclusion. So, for example, on the technical side, we have our social media. We have website. We have community Slack. We have Zoom. We have a directory. We have one password.
Then we also have our guidelines and resources on the social infrastructure side. We have our branding, our mission statement, our code of conduct, the rules. And if you have your own community and you're not really sure where to start, I would encourage you to start here with your mission statement and your code of conduct. These are things that are really going to help individuals understand what your community is about, what you're aiming to achieve, and how they're going to do that in a safe way.
And I also encourage you to think about your community very broadly. For example, I would consider a group of open source package developers a community that requires social infrastructure that tells people how to onboard and how to participate when they want to contribute code.
Beyond this, we have different people in our organization that just have different needs. Chapter organizers, global team, leadership team. And we have different questions we need answered, like how to actually get things done and how to organize events. So, for them, we have our organizer slack and our internal guide, which is also public-facing.
And to be clear, all of this comes back down to the global team, which develop and maintain that centralized infrastructure.
Local autonomy within a global organization
And even though we have this centralized infrastructure, we are part of a global organization and needs across the world vary. So, as Nadeja Serow said, I believe best practices depend on how the chapter organizers can adapt to the reality to make people comfortable at coming to the meetups and also being speakers.
So, what does this look like for us? Let's take a look at four chapters across the world. Gaviron in Botswana, Sao Paolo in Brazil, Vienna in Austria, where useR was just held, and Seattle, where we are right now. These four chapters have different technical infrastructure for communicating with their community members. They use WhatsApp, Telegram, Meetup, or Slack. And they also have different social infrastructure. Their guidelines and resources might vary, and they're also in different languages, like English or Portuguese or other native languages.
And we trust our local community chapters to determine what is best for their community. They're going to vary in other meaningful ways as well. They're going to vary on the day of the week that they meet, the time of the day, and the support that they are able to give to their community or what their community needs. For example, some might provide free transportation to events or child care on site.
And to be clear, nonprofit is not the same as free. I cannot estimate the number of volunteer hours that have gone into this organization since 2012 to make this run. We have no paid staff. We are doing this all on our own time.
And then there's actually, like, a real cost. So our annual operating costs for the global infrastructure is $50,000 U.S. And we're so grateful that this is funded by the R Consortium and individual donations.
Addressing the rebranding challenge
So let's go back to that example, the challenge that we face. I'm still trying to make up my mind on whether to get in touch with the R Ladies community. If someone called me a lady, I would lash, but it seems to be inclusive. This is from a person who on social media is openly trans.
And this is a problem for us because this person has hit that first rung to their pathway to inclusion. They know we exist, but they don't know if they belong with us. And that's a problem.
So we created a new process and some new infrastructure in order to address this challenge. In April of this year, we opened an issue on our community repository in our R Ladies GitHub organization. The title of this issue is Rebranding from R Ladies to R Ladies Past. We talk about the mission of our organization and how our name doesn't necessarily support our mission. We've gotten feedback about this over the years.
We invite people to comment on this issue. Talk to us about what you think. Do you think it's a good idea to stay R Ladies? Should we become R Ladies Plus? Should we become some name entirely different that we haven't thought of?
We talk about the pros of this. This change could be meaningful for members of our community to identify with what we do better. We talk about the cons of this. We have really large brand name recognition and it could be hard to shift that. And there's other cons as well. Because remember, we are a global organization and we have to respect the needs of our local communities. And in some countries, being a minority gender is deemed illegal. Which means that in those countries, hosting an event branded as R Ladies Plus could pose a risk to event organizers and attendees for persecution.
And in some countries, being a minority gender is deemed illegal. Which means that in those countries, hosting an event branded as R Ladies Plus could pose a risk to event organizers and attendees for persecution.
So we created the best social infrastructure that we could. There's always room for improvement. But what we did is we had a very long and detailed readme about how this community discussion would operate. We talked about the timeline. We talked about the ways you could contribute comments either by commenting on the GitHub discussion forum or by submitting an anonymous comment via a form. We talked about the expectations in terms of please contribute your discussion in English as a common language. And we also talked about how we were going to have moderators for this discussion to ensure that the code of conduct was followed.
And then of course, we had our technical infrastructure to make this happen. We used GitHub as a platform for discussion. We used Airtable to collect the form responses. And then we used Slack as a tool to communicate about that or be notified. We had a really nice Airtable automation so that when a new form was submitted, it sent a message directly to Slack that looked like this. A new anonymous comment has been submitted. And that way we knew automatically to review it for posting on the forum.
What we learned
And I'm not here today to tell you the result of the decision. The rebranding decision is in progress. And you're welcome to go look at all of the thoughts that were contributed. We are so grateful that the community came in and talked about this with us because we did not feel capable of a leadership team of seeing all the points of view in our narrow limited worldview.
And we learned so much from this discussion that even among cis women, people don't like the word ladies. And either for personal reasons or like bigger reasons that it imposes feelings and sentiments of colonization. And people supplied so many different great ideas in terms of why we should be stay our ladies, move to our ladies plus, or be some other name entirely.
And again, going back to a global organization, it's really important to us that whatever name we have resonates with people across the world. If your native language is not English, whatever name we have has to be readily understood to you.
But we learned something even more important through this process. We learned that regardless of the outcome, we need better social infrastructure to facilitate the pathways to inclusion for gender diverse members of our community. There's a lot more that we could be doing.
Thoughts for your community
So thoughts for your community. Thriving communities require both technical and social infrastructure.
That technical infrastructure, almost the easy part, it satisfies your operational needs and we're here because we like doing tech things. The social infrastructure, I would argue, is the hard part, writing down that documentation and getting it right. And the social infrastructure, I would also argue, is the most important part because it's going to nourish the growth and longevity of that community. It's going to be what sustains it, where that tech stack can change over time.
The social infrastructure, I would argue, is the hard part, writing down that documentation and getting it right. And the social infrastructure, I would also argue, is the most important part because it's going to nourish the growth and longevity of that community.
And in a global community or in any diverse community that you have, balancing that standardization and flexibility is going to foster community success. Thank you.