At the Forwards Community team meeting in August 2019, we discussed ideas to facilitate contribution of work from community members in remote locations.
(Here : "remote" can include a situation where a community member does not have opportunity to attend an R event, even if it is closeby.)
These contributions can be
- contributions to a body of knowledge for the effective management of R community events and conferences.
- contributions to software and documentation (i.e. Pull Requests).
There are events to facilitate community members to make their first contribution to R packages.
However, due to the fact that these events are co-located at conferences, it means that only community members who can take part are those who have the means to attend the conference.
The Julia Community have a very informal, but effective, way of encouraging new contributors, with a " My First PR" section in their slack. This is the inspiration behind the idea, but the R community would not be able to facilitate the scheme the same way.
- Creation of a bespoke GitHub repositiory on the Forwards GitHub account.
- Facilitators will post potential pull requests (PR) as issues (i.e. if they spot a spelling mistake)
- First time contributors are encouraged to visit the issues page, and attempt to close the issue.
- Facilitators assists them by discussing what to do on the issues page.
- Contributors complete the PR. The intention is that they are acknowledged as contributors on the CRAN documentation.
- Furthermore successful completion of this task creates a stronger connection between the contributor to the package development process, and they seek more involved roles in future.