We are so glad you’re considering becoming a chapter organizer. By doing so, you are helping R-Ladies mission to increase gender diversity in the R community globally, and you are connecting with your local community. You’ll also be interacting with R-Ladies volunteers all around the world.
Becoming an organizer might feel overwhelming at first whilst you are getting to know the organization and the tool we use (Slack, Meetup). Please feel free to ask us any question! It’ll also help us improve our guidance.
Being an organizer will take some of your precious time and energy: scheduling and holding events, searching speakers for said events, engaging with the chapter members on social media or email… We hope it’s worth it. We encourage you
Being an organizer might not be the right fit for you even as a motivated R-Lady! Get in touch about possible openings in the global team, whose tasks are described in another section. You might also want to volunteer as a speaker at your local chapter or another chapter. Or you might want to volunteer with other R organizations, check out Minorities in R and Forwards.
Here’s what will happen if you want to start a chapter…
Send an email to chapters@rladies.org indicating who you are and where you would like to start a chapter. Conversation with our onboarding team will ensue.
Please use a personal email address for correspondence, and not a work or university email address, as these often change or become inactive over time.
Your brand-new chapter will be equipped with R-Ladies tech infrastructure, in particular a Meetup account and an email. Meetup is an online social platform used to announce events and manage registration to events.
You will organize your first event and following ones, with help of your co-organizer(s) and tips fellow chapter organizers all over the world. You might take part in the chapter mentoring program.
You might organize events online with the global R-Ladies Zoom account (at the time of writing, in the middle of a pandemic, no in-person R-Ladies events take place). If you record the session, it can be featured on our YouTube channel!
You might have some questions about money, see the corresponding chapter.
At one point you or chapter might need to retire.
If you want to become an organizer at your local chapter, get in touch with the current organizers.
Refer to the dedicated chapter
In the words of Nadejda Sero from R-Ladies Cotonou,
I believe best practices depend on how the chapter organisers can adapt to their reality to make people comfortable at coming to the meetups and also being speakers.