<p><div><div><div><div data-show-faces="false" data-height="21" data-width="100" data-layout="button_count" data-send="true" data-href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/the-value-of-welcome/"></div></div><div></div></div><div></div></div>
<div>
(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://ropensci.org/blog/blog/2017/07/18/value-of-welcome"> rOpenSci Blog</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<div>
I’m participating in the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.aaas.org/cefp/about" target="_blank">AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP)</a>, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The inaugural <a rel="nofollow" href="https://blog.trelliscience.com/introducing-the-2017-community-engagement-fellows/" target="_blank">cohort of Fellows</a> is made up of 17 community managers working in a wide range of scientific communities. This is cross-posted from the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://blog.trelliscience.com/the-value-of-welcome/" target="_blank">Trellis blog</a> as part of a <a rel="nofollow" href="https://blog.trelliscience.com/tag/fellows-blog-series" target="_blank"> series of reflections</a> that the CEFP Fellows are sharing.</div>
<p>In my training as a <a rel="nofollow" href="https://blog.trelliscience.com/introducing-the-2017-community-engagement-fellows/" target="_blank">AAAS Community Engagement Fellow</a>, I hear repeatedly about the value of extending a personal welcome to your community members. This seems intuitive, but recently I put this to the test. Let me tell you about my experience creating and maintaining a #welcome channel in a community Slack group.</p>
<p><img align="center" src="https://i1.wp.com/blog.trelliscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/4344878104_e537b0248b_z.jpg?w=456&ssl=1" data-recalc-dims="1"></p>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/90371939@N00/4344878104" target="_blank">&quot;Welcome&quot;</a> by <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/90371939@N00/" target="_blank">Nathan</a> under <a rel="nofollow" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></p>
<p>I listen in on and occasionally participate in a Slack group for <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rladies.org/" target="_blank">R-Ladies</a> community organizers (R-Ladies is a global organization with local meetup chapters around the world, for women who do/want to do programming in R). Their Slack is incredibly well-organized and has a #welcome channel where new joiners are invited to introduce themselves in a couple of sentences. The leaders regularly jump in to add a wave emoji and ask people to introduce themselves if they have not already.</p>
<p>At rOpenSci, where I am the Community Manager, when people joined our 150+ person Slack group, they used to land in the #general channel where people ask and answer questions. Often, new people joining went unnoticed among the conversations. So recently I copied R-Ladies and created a #welcome channel in our Slack and made sure any new people got dropped in there, as well as in the #general channel. The channel purpose is set as &quot;<em>A place to welcome new people and for new people to introduce themselves. We welcome participation and civil conversations that adhere to our <a rel="nofollow" href="http://unconf17.ropensci.org/coc" target="_blank">code of conduct</a>.</em>&quot;</p>
<p>I pinged three new rOpenSci community members to join and introduce themselves, and in the #general channel said “Hey, come say hi to people over here at #welcome!”. One day later, we already had 33 people in #welcome. I spent that morning nurturing it, noting some people’s activities and contributions that they might not otherwise highlight themselves <em>e.g.</em> <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/Chucheria" target="_blank">Bea</a> just did her first open peer software review for rOpenSci, or <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/metamattj" target="_blank">Matt</a> has been answering people’s questions about meta data, or <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/juliesquid" target="_blank">Julie</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/ben_d_best" target="_blank">Ben</a> and <a rel="nofollow" href="https://twitter.com/jafflerbach" target="_blank">Jamie</a> are co-authors on this <a rel="nofollow" href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0160" target="_blank">cool new paper</a> about open data science tools. And I gave a shoutout to R-Ladies stating clearly that I copied their fantastic #welcome channel.</p>
<p>People are introducing themselves, tagging with emoji and thanking “the community” saying things like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“…I feel super lucky to be a part of the rOpenSci community, which has … had a great positive impact on my life!”</p>
<p>“I love rOpenSci for building this community and helping people like me become confident data scientists!”</p>
<p>“[I’m] hoping to contribute more to the group moving forward”</p>
<p>“…thank you for having me part of this community!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such is the value of #welcome.</p>
	<p>
<div>
<div>To <strong>leave a comment</strong> for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: <strong><a href="http://ropensci.org/blog/blog/2017/07/18/value-of-welcome"> rOpenSci Blog</a></strong>.</div>
<hr>
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers.com</a> offers <strong><a rel="nofollow" href="https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=RBloggers">daily e-mail updates</a></strong> about <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-project.org/" title="The R Project for Statistical Computing">R</a> news and <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/tutorial" title="R tutorials">tutorials</a> on topics such as: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/data%20science" title="Data science">Data science</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/Big%20Data" title="Big Data">Big Data, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-users.com/" title="R jobs">R jobs</a>, visualization (<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/ggplot2" title="ggplot and ggplot2 tutorials">ggplot2</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/boxplot" title="Boxplots using lattice and ggplot2 tutorials">Boxplots</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/map" title="Maps and gis">maps</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/animation" title="Animation in R">animation</a>), programming (<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/RStudio" title="RStudio IDE for R">RStudio</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/sweave" title="Sweave and literate programming">Sweave</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/LaTeX" title="LaTeX in R">LaTeX</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/SQL" title="SQL and databases">SQL</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/eclipse" title="Eclipse IDE for R">Eclipse</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/git" title="git and github, Version Control System">git</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/hadoop" title="Large data in R using Hadoop">hadoop</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/Web+Scraping" title="Web Scraping of google, facebook, yahoo, twitter and more using R">Web Scraping</a>) statistics (<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/regression" title="Regressions and ANOVA analysis tutorials">regression</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/PCA" title="principal component analysis tutorial">PCA</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/time+series" title="Time series">time series</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/trading" title="finance trading">trading</a>) and more...
<img width="1" alt="" src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RBloggers/~4/9OfiXog_aHI" height="1"></a></div>