This pre-conference session is aimed at newcomers to useR! as an introduction to the conference and the wider R community. The session will feature short talks, open discussion and informal networking.
* Request a room for 2 hours to run the Forwards Newbie session a day before the main event. Preferably after the tutorials, R Foundation business meeting, and developer days, so participants of those events can join the newbie session. If there is a cocktail hour for one of preceding events, our social time should overlap so newbies can interact with the participants.
* Have the organizers advertise the session on the main conference page, in the program or under “side events”. For example:
Forwards is organizing a session for newcomers to useR! as an introduction to the conference and the wider R community on DATE AND TIME at LOCATION. There will be a social time TIME(first hour), followed by an hour of short talks:
Talk 1 (SPEAKER)
...
Talk 4 (SPEAKER) * Get information about the tech requirements so you can ask speakers to send you slides in advance. Make the slides available online through the conference website if possible, or otherwise through the Forwards GitHub or wbsite. Plan to be at the room earlier and ask the speakers to do the same so you can test the setup.
* Try to find people that can talk for 10 minutes about the conference, how to participate in R communities, how to contribute to R through open source, taking into account technical skills and navigating the ecosystem. It’s a great opportunity for prominent people in the R community to interact with newbies and a lot of them are happy to take part and make useR! more inclusive. Previously we have had 4/5 talks on topics such as
- Forwards
- The R ecosystem
- R User Groups (by organizer of the local group)
- R ladies (by member of global leadership team)
- Making the most of useR!
- useR! abstract review: what the program committee look for
- Contributing to the ecosystem
- rOpenSci onboarding system and community
- Collaborative coding
- Making a career from coding
You can repeat topics from previous years.
* Example invitation:
Hope you are doing well. I was wondering if you would be willing to give a small talk for the newbies session. We’re looking for speakers that can help introduce the conference and the community for first time attendees. Some topics from previous years were: The R ecosystem, Making the most of useR!, rOpenSci onboarding system and community, and Making a career from coding.
I think you are quite active with PROJECT so you could speak about TOPIC or about TOPIC? What do you think? Perhaps you have another idea? If in addition, you can think of other people or topics that could be relevant, for a small talk (it is 10 minutes max on DAY evening), please let me know.
* Tweet about it from the Forwards account with a link to the main conference schedule / side events. You can also link to the Forwards GitHub page, simply make a markdown file with all the details for useR! Forwards events. For example: [Forwards - Conferences - user!2019 plans](https://github.com/forwards/conferences/blob/master/user2019_plans.md)
- Previous speakers and topics for reference:
- Previous organisers of the newbie session are: Heather Turner, Julie Josse