Google Season of Docs with R: useR! Information Board

“Google Season of Docs (GSoD) provides support for open source projects to improve their documentation and gives professional technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in open source.” (Source: Program website)

The program makes it possible for technical writers to work closely with an open-source community they may or may not have been engaged with, to solve real problems with high-quality documentation.

In the end, an awareness of open source, of documentation and technical writing is raised, while participating open source organizations benefit from an improvement in their documentation. The R Project participated in GSoD as an open-source organization for the first time this year after several years of participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), another open-source program focused on coding.

The useR! conference

useR! is the main annual conference for the R user and developer community that is organized by a community of volunteers and supported by the R Foundation. It is organized by a different team of community organizers each year and has been held since 2004. The useR! conference program consists of both invited and user-contributed presentations in addition to tutorials and other social events.

With so much historical information about useR! scattered around Git repositories, useR! websites, and organizers’ hard-disks, the R Project proposed to organize useR! documentation with two outputs- an information board and a knowledgebase. The knowledgebase was proposed to take the form of an online book, inspired by examples such as the satRdays knowledgebase. The information board was proposed as a dashboard to interactively browse historical information. These two projects were carried on concurrently over a span of 6 months (May – November, 2021) during which my primary responsibility as a technical writer was to curate historical useR! conference data and develop the information board with this data.

The Information board

Why an information board?

After participating in useR! 2021 as a part of the organizing committee, I identified several gaps within the organizational process that an information board could fill up. Organizers spend a lot of time looking for information from past useR! conference websites, past organizers, and other archives of un-structured or semi-structured data. This process repeats each year for every useR! conference and this seems to put a burden on past organizers or co-ordinators to continuously provide information to future organizers.

To fill in these gaps, I proposed to:

• gather data in a structured format for at least the past six useR! conferences
• build a dashboard using this data-set
• structure things in such a way that updating the data files leads to an updated dashboard after a rebuild process

The final product could be found by accessing the following URL: https://bit.ly/infoboard-cynkra

Use cases

A typical useR! conference program consists of keynotes, regular talks, lightning talks, poster sessions, tutorials and social events. The organizing team for each conference would need to identify keynote speakers, select talks and tutorials, and determine which social events to offer. In addition to those, the organizing team would need to set up partnerships for the conference – sponsors (that can contribute in different ways) and partner organizations. To prospective organizers who have never organized useR! or a conference of such capacity, it is burdensome to sift through 15+ past useR! websites to search out the type of tutorials that have been offered in the past, the number of keynote presentations to offer and around what topics, or what kind of social events to host.

It is difficult to ascertain if a talk has been presented in a useR! in the past without access to structured and filterable historical data.

Furthermore, with diversity and inclusion in mind, it could be difficult to determine presenters that have already presented many times before (perhaps on a similar topic) and those from under-represented groups that have only had a few chances to present talks at a useR!

For organizers to target sponsors who are interested in R and who may have sponsored in the past within the location of the conference is hard without data-driven assistance. For potential sponsors, it provides some insight into the scope and reach of useR! conferences.

For entities like the R Foundation, R Consortium and R Forwards, the information board provides an easy way to gain insights into the history of useR! while planning for the future in a global and diverse context.

Other conferences beyond useR! could benefit from the information board as it provides organized data around people, organizations, and presentations that could be helpful in planning local and regional R events.

Tools

I used flexdashboard for the structure and layout of the dashboard, echarts4r for charts, and reactable for interactive tables.

Technical information

The source for this dashboard lives in a GitLab repository where issues or merge requests can be raised.

All the data are located in the data directory and a description of the years which each dataset covers.

The charts and tables are produced from scripts in the R directory – hopefully making it easier to reproduce them or use them in other contexts.

The sidebar menu, footer and JavaScript codes are saved as HTML fragments that are included via the YAML header of the index.Rmd file.

License

The data is available for download under a CC BY 4.0 license, while the R code is available under a GPL-3.0 license.

Technical Writing experience

Having written R articles for Open Data Science in the past, the experience gained from this GSoD project improved my technical writing and project management skills. In a collaborative sense: I received and implemented feedback several times a month from different volunteers across several timezones, while working to produce the deliverable per project-phase and covering the general scope of the project.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible at this time without support from Google via the GSoD program. Much appreciation goes to the GSoD admins for the R Project – Heather Turner and Matt Bannert – who did a lot of admin work from the proposal to the final report. I also appreciate Noa Tamir, who excellently managed the week-to-week supervision of this work. I appreciate the help I received from several volunteers on this project including past organizers who provided data from their archives.

Finally, cynkra is passionate about open-source and the R community, and this has provided an enabling environment for this project to succeed and to continue succeeding.