Our team focuses on R Foundation conferences, liaising with organisers/program committee on policies and inclusion initiatives.
This introduction is mainly for current and future useR! organisers, but our work might also be useful for other R conference organisers. Please feel free to use our resources for your R community events! You can reach out to us if you have questions on how to set up similar Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives for your R Community events. We would also love to hear from you if you can recommend new DEI initiatives, resources, or contacts you think might be relevant to useR!
Once the useR! organising committee has been established, the R Foundation will let the conferences team know and we will appoint a point of contact for the event to facilitate communication.
We find it useful to have the organisers get to know our knowledge base, and do an intro call with the point of contact early on. A typical agenda for the intro meeting will be:
- Personal introductions and establishing communication channels.
- Establish what DEI initiatives the committee has planned to do themselves. In recent years these have been mentoring programs and diversity scholarships. For these initiatives the Forwards contact person will be an on-call advisor whom the team can ask questions and support.
- Establish if the committee would like Forwards to organise their Code of Conduct Response team, or help train a team they will organise.
- Introduce the Forwards side events (for community groups, and the newbie session) and establish point of contacts for scheduling and announcement via the main event. Forwards can take care of identifying leads for these sessions from a diverse group of established community members.
- Introduce the Forwards Survey and establish a point of contact for sending it via the conference's communication channels.
- Establish if the organisers need support with the diversity scholarships. We have members who organised it for previous events.
- Introduce the conference buddy scheme and establish a point of contact for communication channels (print program, online, opening remarks).
- Introduce the Forwards best practices for accessible events and ensure the organizers have a designated accessibility contact.
- Review previous work that has been done by Forwards/useR!, to ensure continued good practice (childcare provision, representation of women in programme, diversity in roles such as session chairs).
- Discuss any new ideas for improving DEI.
We recommend holding this intro call early on, as the committee may need to consider how to best incorporate us into their ongoing communication channels, use us as advisors for DEI related ideas and concerns in their ongoing work, give us guidance on new areas of DEI they would like us to tackle (we add new initiatives every event!), as well as get clarification on timelines for some initiatives so that we don't have to feel unnecessarily rushed in the last few weeks before the conference.
You can learn more about our activity by reading our guides for DEI initiatives at useR! conferences:
- How to organise the useR! Conference Buddies
- How to organise R community social events
- How to organise the useR! Forwards Newbie Session
- How to organise a code of conduct response team
- How to instruct session chairs on code of conduct response
- How to organise useR! Diversity scholarships
We have also introduced Best Practices for inclusion beyond accessibility. As we begin these get incorporated in future events, we will share How-tos based on established organisational experience.
Our team members vary, but we usually have a few previous useR! organisers, and a few community organisers and volunteers, who help us establish new DEI initiatives, by representing a minority group themselves, or by their ongoing work as allies to minority groups.