Curator guide

How Curating Works

  • Curatorship begins each Monday at 11h00 UTC and ends the following Saturday at 16h00 UTC.
  • For the duration of the curatorship, the profile photo will be a photo of the curator. This is updated by the RoCur administrator.
  • The personal twitter handle of the curator will be in the bio (if applicable, you do not need to be a twitter user prior to curating).
  • Your first post should introduce yourself to the account followers. Your first tweet should tell the audience: what you do (your job, hobbies, etc.), and what you do in R.
  • Tweet throughout the week! We do not require that you tweet a specific number of times. But, we ask that you be as active as your schedule allows during your curatorship.
  • Every Sunday, the administrator will update access of the account for the next curator via Tweetdeck.

Curating Agreement

By signing on to be a curator of @WeAreRLadies you agree to the following:

  1. Abide by R-Ladies’ Code of Conduct in all activity and interactions you have on the @WeAreRLadies account.

  2. Be the sole tweeter of @WeAreRLadies for the week that you are assigned.

  3. Don’t change the photo, biography, background or theme of the @WeAreRLadies account, unless expressly directed to do so (e.g. changing the profile photo at the start of your week).

  4. Provide a profile photo which may be used during your week, and some background information on yourself, including research and interests, to be featured on the @WeAreRLadies account.

  5. All content posted during your week is your responsibility. That said, the @WeAreRLadies administrators will take action if your posts contain racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

  6. Refrain from using obscene or abusive language.

  7. Please use inclusive language when addressing your twitter audience. Please consider using all, everybody, y’all, folks or anything similar as not everybody part of R-Ladies identifies as female.

  8. Don’t actively promote or advertise any business or receive remuneration from a third party to do so. **Please see our section on Promotional Tweeting for more information on this.

  9. After your assigned week, remove access to @WeAreRLadies from any applications to which you may have granted access.

  10. You may not follow, unfollow, or block any other twitter users from the account. Additionally, you may not interact with individuals via direct messages.

In the event that you receive abuse while contributing, please do block the offender if you feel it necessary. If this does occur, please send the administrators an email weare@rladies.org or via the R-Ladies Community Slack, noting the offender’s Twitter handle and a description of the offense.

Please follow the Twitter terms of service The administrators of @WeAreRLadies reserve the right to warn or revoke the access of anyone who violates Twitter’s terms of service or breaches any of the above rules.

Tweeting Tips

Introducing Yourself

Start your curatorship by introducing yourself, what you do (your job, hobbies, etc.), and what you do in R.

Suggestions on how to introduce yourself:

  • Share a URL to your website or github or etc.
  • If your photo on the account differs from the photo on your personal twitter account, post the photo of your personal twitter account.

General Tweeting Guidelines

  • We do not require that you tweet a specific number of times. But, we ask that you be as active as your schedule allows during your curatorship.
    • We completely understand if you are no longer able to curate during your scheduled week. We ask that you notify us by emailing WeAre@rladies.org as soon as you know you are unable to curate. We highly encourage you to reschedule your curation to another week!
  • The content of your tweets is all up to you! But keep it relevant to R and/or R-Ladies. Make the account and its tweets useful for learning.
  • Tweet pictures/graphics whenever possible, if you do please add alternative text for screen-reader users.
    • Posting photos from R-Ladies meetups or other R-related events is highly encouraged.
    • Please properly attribute your photos and graphics by asking permission from the source if not you and tagging the individual if able.
    • Tag individuals who are in the photos if able.
  • Use hashtags! (See below, Tweeting about R, for more information on this)
  • Add emojis and gifs when appropriate 😄. For gifs, also add alternative text.
  • Have Fun!

Tweeting about R

  • If you are part of an R-Ladies Chapter, highlight a project your local chapter is working on.
  • Share relevant articles, blog posts, etc. relevant to your work or interests in R.
  • Tell us something you just learned about R.
  • Tell followers about a current R project you are doing (share a line of code or dataviz, link to a package you use a lot).
  • When mentioning a package, add a link to its CRAN/BioConductor/GitHub page.
    • If possible, tag the Twitter account of the maintainer if this person isn’t too famous yet (e.g. no need to link and tag Hadley Wickham when mentioning ggplot2).
    • Same goes for courses, books, and etc.
  • Use hashtags whenever possible.
    • Use the hashtag #RLadies whenever possible and relevant.
    • Use the #rstats hashtag when you share something that can be useful for the greater R community (e.g. a cool package); however, don’t use it when saying “Oh I’m doing R look at my screen” because this would create clutter in the R hashtag timeline and potentially lead to people blocking/silencing the account which we do not want. 😉
    • Some other hashtag examples: #dataviz, #rspatial, #opendata
    • You can also hashtag: package names, the location of your local chapter, etc.

Interacting with your audience

One goal of @WeAreRLadies is to maintain a strong R-Ladies community on Twitter! Therefore, please respond to people who interact with the account.

If someone asks a question, we suggest re-tweeting their question with your response as a comment so that others can see the original question.

Other suggestions for interacting with your audience:

  • Ask a question about something you are having trouble with in R (our community is all about helping and supporting each other).
  • Ask for recommendations on packages/datasets/features in R for a project you are working on.
  • Create a twitter poll for followers to respond to. Please note: You cannot create a twitter poll in Tweetdeck. We recommend creating a poll on your personal account and retweeting it via @WeAreRLadies.

Your Last Tweet

Consider using the last tweet of your curatorship as a way to “sign off.” Some ways you might do this is:

  • Acknowledge that your curation week is ending and that this tweet or thread will be your last.
  • Consider highlighting 1 main takeaway (e.g., “I really enjoyed discussing NLP & R with you”, retweeting a thread where people added links to different resources).
  • If applicable, feel free to add brief acknowledgements/thanks (e.g., “Thank you to my fellow R-Lady @[twitter handle], who encouraged me to curate!")
  • Invite them to follow you on your personal Twitter account or other publicly-available, professional platform.
  • Add anything else you might want to share as a last tweet (a fun gif, etc.).

Example

“My week curating has come to a close! Thank you for following along and discussing [topic discussed during curation week]. Keep in touch by following me at @[twitter handle].”

Promotional Tweeting

It is not permitted to promote companies and/or businesses through @WeAreRLadies.

On this account, promoting a company, business, or service is broadly defined as any instance where any entity receives financial benefit from the twitter post. This includes:

  • If you, the curator, receives remuneration for posting about a specific company, business, or service (including referral links).
  • If an organization, company, or individual receives profit from individuals using their service (i.e. users would have to pay for the service).
  • If the post actively solicits followers to partake in services where an entity receives financial benefit.

Examples of promotional tweets that are not allowed include:

  • “Buy this book about XYZ in R!”
  • “Here is an online course that might be useful”

We encourage @WeAreRLadies curators to share free, openly-available resources to our audience and share personal experiences about using specific resources without promoting or soliciting on behalf of any particular company, business or service. This includes:

  • Discussing an open source package that you use and why it’s helpful.
  • Discussing what you use R for at your job.
  • Sharing free, openly-available resources that you used to learn R and explaining what you liked and disliked about this resource.

Examples include:

  • “As my job at [company name], I do/learn/use XYZ in R”
  • “An awesome package I use for XYZ in R is [package name]. [function name] is especially useful for ABC (includes example)”
  • “My first introduction to XYZ was this blog post: URL”

Pre-Curation Week Checklist

Previous curators have reported that both generating content for tweets and tweeting from tweetdeck to be challenging. The goal of this checklist is to ease both the technical and content aspects of curation in advance of your curation week. We recommend completing this checklist one week in advance of your curation. This gives you time to ping the #rocur_twitter channel of the R-Ladies community slack if questions arise.

To prepare for your curation week, we recommend the following steps to familiarize yourself with Tweetdeck and other processes that will be helpful when tweeting through your curation:

Basic: I only have an hour or less

  • Send a Tweet from your personal account via Tweetdeck. See more in our FAQ.
    - While logged into twitter, visit: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/.
    - In the top left of the browser window, click the “Tweet” button, a menu should appear with a text box to enter your tweet. Be sure your personal account is selected if you are already connected to multiple accounts on Tweetdeck.

  • Tweet an image with alternative text.
    - See specific instructions on how to do this in Tweetdeck in our FAQ.
    - See a blog post on writing alt text for data visualizations or Harvard’s Digital Accessibility page on writing alt text for images.

  • Read at least one artifact from previous curators (see a full list of artifacts).

Intermediate: I have more time to prepare

  • Schedule a Tweet from your personal account via Tweetdeck.
    - In Tweetdeck, compose your tweet. Then, click “Schedule Tweet” and select the date and time you’d like the Tweet posted. - Click Schedule Tweet at date/time.

  • Practice creating a thread on your personal account via Tweetdeck. See more in our FAQ.

  • Create a list of topics you hope to tweet about during your curation week. Previous curators have documented how they planned content for the week (see posts by Divya Seernani or Shannon Pileggi) . Brainstorming content at any level of detail before your curation week starts will be helpful!

A table with two columns: one for day of the week, another labelled “what to expect” for topics to be discussed. Above: A schedule of topics from Divya Seernani when she curated in February 2020. She organized topics by day of the week she planned to talk about them.

Work from previous curators & the @WeAreRLadies team

We are grateful all our previous curators who have worked hard to build our Twitter community. Many of them have also produced blogs, talks, and other resources on their curating experience.

On curating for @WeAreRLadies

Looking at data from @WeAreRLadies

If you have written any blog posts, given any talks, or analyzed any data in relation to @WeAreRLadies, please add your links via pull request!