Abstract

The R Project is over 20 years old, but its future is not secure – many of the R Core Team are nearing or post retirement and there are not enough new contributors to sustain the work. In this talk, I will present a number of initiatives, fostered under my EPSRC RSE Fellowship: ‘Sustainability and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in the R Project’, that are designed to encourage and train a new, more diverse, generation of contributors.

The initiatives vary from regular support on the R Contributor Slack and in R Contributor Office Hours, to one-off events aimed at new contributors such as a Collaboration Campfire series and a Bug BBQ . I will report back on the recent R Project Sprint 2023, hosted at Warwick University, which brought members of the R Core Team together with both novice and experienced contributors to work in collaboration – the first event of this kind in the R community. I will discuss how we hope to keep the momentum going and how RSEs might contribute to the R Project and other fundamental open source projects.

Hybrid Zoom details will be emailed to the RSE mailing list; if you are not on the list, please contact the organisers.