Tech infrastructure for chapters

Slack

  • Once you initiate the process of becoming an organizer by sending an email to chapter [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.
  • The Organizers’ Slack has a lot of channels that cover different topics. Explore them and join the ones that you find useful.
  • 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 also a global “all the R-Ladies” Slack.

Etiquette for Slack

  • Prefer asking in official channels rather to DM people or sending an email. This allows us to create collective knowledge, i.e., learning from other experiences. It will also ensure you a faster response, as more people will see your question.

  • 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.

  • We will create your chapter on Meetup during the onboarding process. R-Ladies meetup.com accounts are paid for by the R-Ladies Organization using a grant from the R-Consortium.
  • You need to have a personal account on Meetup for us to asign you the role of co-organizer there.

Suggested Meetup Alignment

The meetup page for your chapter will be created with some default text en English. This is what you will find there:

This is a local chapter of R-Ladies Global (https://www.rladies.org), an organisation that promotes gender diversity in the R community worldwide. We meetup in person or virtually to learn about the R programming language, algorithms and advanced tools. 

R-Ladies welcomes members of all R proficiency levels, whether you're a new or aspiring R user, or an experienced R programmer interested in mentoring, networking & expert upskilling. Our community is designed to develop our members' R skills & knowledge through social, collaborative learning & sharing. Supporting minority identity access to STEM skills & careers, the Free Software Movement, and contributing to the global R community!

We are pro-actively inclusive of queer, trans, and all minority identities, with additional sensitivity to intersectional identities. Our priority is to provide a safe community space for anyone identifying as a minority gender who is interested in working with R. As a founding principle, there is no cost or charge to participate in any of our R-Ladies communities around the world. You can access our presentations, R scripts, and Projects on our Github account (https://github.com/rladies) and follow us on Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@RLadiesGlobal) to stay up to date about R-Ladies news!

Make sure you read and comply with our code of conduct (https://rladies.org/coc/) and community guidelines (https://guide.rladies.org/about/mission/#r-ladies-rules--guidelines).

Please note that by taking part in an R-Ladies event you grant the community organizers 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 organizer.

To edit this message an other basic information of your grooup, go to Manage Group > Edit Group Settings and select the ‘Basic Information’ tab.

  • Feel free to translate this message to your local language(s).

  • You can adapt the content, as long as it aligns with our code of conduct and community guidelines. This means that R-Ladies mission, the code of conduct and the message regarding photography and filmings must be included.

  • You can add links to your chapters’ social media if you want.

  • You can add new topics.

  • Please don’t change the name of the group or the meetup url.

Every time you run an event publish it into your chapter Meetup account. This will keep the chapter active. Only events published on Meetup are considered as chapter activity (because these are the ones we can keep track of).

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

As of November 2022 R-Ladies email use a Google Workspace to manage emails accounts. We provide chapters email address (yourcity@rladies.org) during the onboarding process. You do not need to request an email, after the creation of your chapter account you will get an email from R-Ladies Google Workspace with information about your chapter email. adress, the temporary password, the link to login to your account for the first time and change the temporary password and instruction on how to create strong passwords.

The chapter email address is the public facing email address for your community, so members or meetup hosts (a company or university) can get in touch with you and your co-organisers easily. You can then use your personal email address to reply., but we recommend you put the chapter email in cc when answering an email so that your co-organizers can see the answer.

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.
  • If you have an issue with your email, have read all the online guidance and still can’t resolve your issue, please explain your issue on Organizers Slack in the #organizers channel. A volunteer will get back to you as soon as possible.

As of March 18, 2019, we only provide personal rladies.org emails (yourname@rladies.org) to Leadership and Global Team members.

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.