The goal of this activity is to start a conversation with prospective organisers, answer any questions and send information on how to get a new chapter started. This activity can be carried out by a team of 2 people, to split the workload and guarantee requests are addressed timely.
Monitor the email: chapters@rladies.org. As part of the Onboarding
Team, the messages to this account are forwarded to the email
address you provided during your own onboarding process.
On the rladies.org website, we ask any prospective organisers to get in touch via email. Especially during conferences, we may receive a high volume of requests for information. If possible, this email address should be monitored daily.
If there is a request for activation of a new chapter, we need the following information:
City/Region/Country where the meetup will be located
Name(s) of organiser(s) and their email address (to be added to the organisers slack).
Make a search on GitHub (https://github.com/rladies/rladies.github.io/tree/main/data/chapters) to make sure the city does not have a chapter yet. You can use CTRL+F to search using the city’s name.
If there is a chapter already, check the name of the organisers match
Ask the person to confirm they identify as a woman or gender minority and are interested in the R programming language (just an ok, we are not collecting information).
For alignment with the R-Ladies mission, can you just write an ok as an answer to "Do you identify as a woman or gender minority, and are you interested in the R programming language?" (really just an ok, we're not collecting personal data!)
If there is no chapter, check if there is a chapter nearby. If so, put the person in contact with the new chapter.
If there is no local chapter yet:
We make sure it is a city using Google Maps
We add the chapter to the chapter data (https://github.com/rladies/rladies.github.io/tree/main/data/chapters), only the info below (no email address):
City
Region (if relevant)
Country
Organisers
Status = Prospective
Invite organisers to the organisers slack.
Send the prospective organiser an email with all the most important information and links (see Appendix A)
Other types of requests:
People may ask to be added to the organiser slack, please check if their name is in the meetup list of co-organisers. If not, ask why.
Change list of organisers :
Check and amend the list of organisers here:
Email the former organiser for confirmation (see template B).
General information -\point them to the community slack and meetup dashboard (see template C)
Onboarding email template
Hi \<\<first name\>\>!
It's great to hear that you are interested in starting R-Ladies
\<\<city chapter\>\>!
We have some information on starting a local chapter here:
https://guide.rladies.org/
We also have a Slack group which I'll send you an invitation to in a
minute. The Slack group is mainly how we communicate and a great place
to discuss meetup organization and other matters (R-related and
other). Once you join, please say hello and introduce yourself in the
*\#welcome* channel. When you are ready to launch your chapter and start
advertising on social media, please go to #new_chapters and ask:
- The meetup team to set up a new meetup page for you,
- The email team to create a chapter email address, you will
need this to set up social media accounts.
In the Slack, together with all R-Ladies chapters organizers worldwide,
you will find the
R-Ladies Global leadership team. Feel free to reach out to them through
the channel #ask_the_leadership if you have questions that are not
addressed in the Guidelines or that other organisers
cannot answer. More info about the R-Ladies Global team is can be found on the R-Ladies website:
https://rladies.org/about-us/team/.
There is no specific time frame for launching the chapter. Note that if
other persons are interested in organizing this chapter, they will be
onboarded to join you in the organization. You will be notified of this
and we will put you in contact with any other person interested. The
chapters organizer team will remain open until the first meetup takes
place. After the first meetup, the local organizer team will be in
charge of any further decisions about local leadership.
Once your chapter launches on the meetup.com platform, please hold your
first event within the next 6 months. After that, please keep your
chapter active with at least one event every 6 months. For comparison,
many chapters do an event every 2-3 months and some chapters do monthly
events. If you find yourself struggling with this frequency, please be
in touch and we'll figure something out.
Welcome!
\<YOUR NAME HERE\>
R-Ladies Global Team
\<\*\add if they mention other organizers not cced in the original
message: "Please send us the names and emails of the other organizers so
we can add them to our records."
confirm list of organisers - email template
Hi \<\<first name\>\>,
Thanks for sending through the updated list of organisers. I sent the
slack invites to the new organisers.
We keep information about chapters and organisers on this list on
GitHub:
https://github.com/rladies/starter-kit/blob/master/Current-Chapters.csv.
- Could you please send name and surname of the new organisers so that
I can update the chapter list?
- Could you also please confirm whether I should remove the following
from the list of organisers?
- \<\<NAME1\>\>
- \<\<NAME2\>\>
We assume former organisers provide all the necessary information to new
organisers before passing the baton :)
Kind regards,
\<YOUR NAME HERE\>
general info - email template
Hi \<\<first name\>\>,
Thanks for reaching out.
My recommendation would be to join the R-Ladies community slack channel
(https://rladies.org/form/community-slack/) and start a
conversation with fellow R-Ladies.
Also, please check out this dashboard to find out whether there is a
chapter near you https://www.meetup.com/pro/rladies.
Hope this helps.
Kind regards,
\<YOUR NAME HERE\>