Tech infrastructure for chapters

Slack

  • Once you initiate the process of becoming an organizer by sending an email to info [at] rladies [dot] org, you will be sent and invite to the R-Ladies Organizers’ Slack.
  • Please add your city or chapter to your Slack profile.
  • You can create a channel on the global Slack for communication within the organizing team of your chapter, e.g., #rladies-san-francisco.
  • There is a global “all the R-Ladies” Slack.

Etiquette for Slack

  • Do not DM people based on their role except if they explicitely ask for it. Prefer emails over DMs, and prefer official channels to people. E.g. if you have an email issue, do not DM the person currently in charge of emails but instead send an email to email@rladies.org. Slack DMs create notifications hence fatigue; and are hard to keep track of.

  • As a volunteer receiving DMs, feel free to gracefully redirect them to the communication channel of your choice, or to indicate them to use another communication channel next time.

Meetup

Meetup is an online social platform used to announce events and manage registration to events.

  • Ask Patricia (@patriLoto) or Claudia (@claudia) in the #new_chapters channel on Slack to help get your meetup.com group set up. R-Ladies meetup.com accounts are paid for by the R-Ladies Organization using a grant from the R-Consortium.

Suggested Meetup Alignment

  • “R-Ladies [Location] is part of a worldwide organization to promote Gender Diversity in the R community”

  • Intro text about your chapter meetup group

  • “Here is our Code of Conduct”

  • “To find more details about R-Ladies global initiative by visiting rladies.org”

  • “Follow us on twitter @RLadies[Location] and @RLadiesGlobal”

  • “Check out our R-Ladies Github”

  • Include statement about photography and filmings - this example is from London chapter:

“Photos, Films and all other media/recordings: photographs and/or video/other media will be taken at events held by this community. By taking part in an R-Ladies London event you grant the community organisers full rights to use the images resulting from the photography/video filming/media, and any reproductions or adaptations of the images for publicity, fundraising or other purposes to help achieve the community’s aims. This might include (but is not limited to), the right to use them in their printed and online publicity, social media, press releases and funding applications. If you do not wish to be recorded in these media please inform a community organiser.”

  • Check that the URL is meetup.com/rladies-location.

What if Meetup is not a popular platform in your country? You might want to complement it with e.g. a mailing list after e.g. collecting email addresses via a form. Make sure to comply with the local rules about personal data protection.

Meetup members management

R-Ladies mission focuses on women and other gender minorities. How can you ensure events are open to all whilst still foremost serving women and other gender minorities?

Please do be aware of the relevant Equality Legislation in your jurisdiction, e.g the Equality Act 2010 in the UK, when designing participation frameworks for the majority gender, to ensure your procedures are not infringing local laws re. potential discrimination.

A good strategy might be to make your group private and ask candidates questions before they join

  • Have them accept the code of conduct
  • Remind that priority is given to minoritized genders, that everybody that identifies as such can enter and that cis-men are welcome if 1. they know already someone in, in that case they are asked to give the name of the person, who will act as a liaison just in case (like a “godmother”) 2. If they bring someone and agree to be their +1.

E-Mail

  • You can get a chapter email address (yourcity@rladies.org) which can be set up to forward to all the organisers of a chapter. As of March 18, 2019, we are no longer issuing personal rladies.org emails (yourname@rladies.org) to organizers and will have chapter emails only.
  • Starting in 2021, new chapter emails are just forwarding addresses1. With a forwarding email address, there’s no inbox or password, just a public facing email address that forwards to your local organiser team.
  • Put the chapter email in cc when answering an email so that your co-organizers can see the answer.
  • The idea with the chapter email address is that you can use this as a public facing email address for your community, so members or meetup hosts (a company or university) can get in touch with you easily without you having to list a personal email address publicly. Then you can use your personal email address to reply.
  • To request a new chapter email:
    • Send an email (email@rladies.org) and a volunteer will set up your chapter email for you. Please be patient, as these requests are currently being processed on a monthly basis.
    • In the email, please send the personal email addresses for you and your co-organisers if you would like chapter email to forward there.
Dear R-Ladies global team,

I'd like to request an email for the chapter R-Ladies Pawnee.

Here are the addresses that the email should forward to:

- Leslie Knope (leslie@knope.ok),
- April Ludgate (april@ludgate.ok).

Thank you, best wishes
  • If you add new organizers to your team, please send an email to email@rladies.org to request that their personal email be added to the chapter email forwarding.
Dear R-Ladies global team,

I'd like to request adding an email to the R-Ladies Pawnee chapter email forwarding: our new co-organizer Leslie Knope (leslie@knope.ok).

Thank you, best wishes

Your chapter email account should be used to set up any chapter social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, etc).

You can set up Twitter or other accounts to not send email notifications, so that you and your fellow organizers don’t get overwhelmed with emails going to your chapter accounts.

  • For legacy accounts (full email vs. forwarding addresses), please find instructions on how use your rladies.org email in a mail client or within Gmail.
  • If you have an issue with your email, have read all the online guidance and still can’t resolve your issue, please send an email to email@rladies.org and a volunteer will get back to you as soon as possible.
  • We are exploring new options for email hosting providers (to simplify email account management) and if you’d like to help with that effort, please send an email to info@rladies.org.

Check out the section about account security

GitHub

  • There is a global organisation to collect all material related to R-Ladies in one place, so it’s easier to know what’s out there and get inspired by what other chapters did. Ask to be added as a member in the #new_chapters channel of the organizers slack.
  • If you have presentations, please add them all to one repo for your chapter, e.g., meetup-presentations_london. If you have code for a workshop you can add it to the repository or ask us to create a new repository for that. Please name it location_*, e.g., london_20161130_h2o-and-r.

  1. Chapters started before this have full email accounts, but due to the overhead and changes by our hosting provider, we only set up forwarding emails now. one repo for your chapter, e.g., meetup-presentations_london. If you have code for a workshop you can add it to the repository or ask us to create a new repository for that. Please name it location_*, e.g., london_20161130_h2o-and-r. ↩︎