 Good morning, everybody, and welcome again to the RStudio, the R Medicine Conference. And right now we are going to have a panel discussion talking about how to build up in our community. It sounds like they've done a lot of things with different websites and Twitter and what's Apollo. Eager to hear what it is they have to say. That's great. Thank you for that, Beth. So hello, everyone, and welcome to this panel discussion, which is led by a few different members of the NHSR community. I'm just going to share my screen, just because we've got a bit of a, oh, apparently I need to remove the source to be able to share my screen because there's a number of people on here. So all that's been done, I'll just do a bit of talking. So just to give a bit of a brief introduction to what the NHSR community is and what we do. So it was founded by Professor Mohamed Mohamed in 2018, so he's still a very active member of the community. He's not here today, but he's still very much the founder and very involved. So it was set up initially to be able to promote the learning application and exploitation of R in the NHS. And this is done through loads of different methods and webinars, conferences, and we've got Twitter, Slack, lots of different ways. And it's meant to provide a platform as well for discussing and sharing knowledge and ultimately to try and find some kind of best practice solutions to tackle some of the NHSR's problems. Oh, I can share my screen now. So I will just share this for you briefly. So this just gives a bit of an introduction to some of our resources. So we've got a website there, which you can definitely go to. We've got a Twitter account there, and we've got Slack as well, if you'd like to have a look, find out for some more information, get involved. We'd absolutely love that. And on the right hand side, that just shows you a couple of people, well the people actually on this panel discussion today, Tom can't actually make it today, but he's very involved in the community and he's been involved in sort of organising this panel discussion as well. So he's there. So please do tweet us. I haven't, well, I say that, but I haven't really got Twitter. I don't use it that much, but do tweet the other people on the panel. They're very happy to kind of have a chat about anything R related. So I'll just stop sharing that now. I'll flash it up at the end for you as well. So just to begin then, I'll start with a panel discussion. I just wanted to ask you, Chris, what was life like as an R user in health and social care, would you say, before NHSR, and what problems do you think NHSR has been able to solve? Yeah. So before I answer that question, I'll just say something very quickly about the NHS just for obviously being an international conference. So lots of people have already heard of the NHS. So the NHS, the county is still here by the way, here she is. So the NHS is very large. It's the fifth largest employer in the world, but it's made of hundreds of organisations and I work for one tiny bit of it basically and all of us do. So we're fragmented between the individual organisations and within each organisation we're fragmented as well. So for example, in my organisation there are three different teams that look at data. So NHS analysts, we do do lots of really interesting stuff like risk stratification and statistics and machine learning. We do do all that stuff, but we also as I'm sure they do a lot of health contexts. We do a lot of reporting to central government and other agencies and it can take a lot of time and often a lot of that reporting is pretty meaningless. So in the early days, so I've been using R in the NHS for about 10 years now and in the very early days a lot of organisations were very reluctant to use R, not because of R particularly, but just because it's open source and there were lots of unfounded fears about security and bugs and that kind of thing. And those and again, I think that's common to a lot of organisations and that's actually still going on even today, which is absurdly in this day and age when Google have an R style guide. There are still organisations in the NHS and elsewhere that are reluctant to use it. The whole culture, the whole culture around I was a lot scary and a lot smaller. So I remember when I started learning, a lot of people would go to the R mailing list, which the old hands will remember the R mailing list, it's notorious to this day for being quite a punishing environment for learners. If you ask the wrong question, certain individuals on the list would sort of let you know that you'd ask the wrong question. So that was quite difficult. So learning, I'd say overall in the NHS and elsewhere really was quite difficult and lonely. And it wasn't clear for me anyway, and I think to others in the same boat that the NHS would ever accept it. So it was never clear that it was a skill that was really going to be valued and used. So the NHSR I think has given us three things that are really important and have really made all the difference to me and to the use of R in generally. And they are community visibility and resources. So NHSR gave us a community. I think NHSR is it's a fairly small community and it's a fairly novice community as well. And I actually think that's something to celebrate really. So it's a very friendly environment. We pride ourselves on that. There are no stupid questions. And I think some people who are maybe intimidated by Stack Overflow or some other Slack's feel completely okay asking questions. And we do have some people in the Slack who can certainly answer the more difficult questions. So that's really great. It's given us visibility as well. So NHSR is not just something that was sort of cobbled together by a load of data scientists in Hoodies. It's a proper project. It's been funded by the Health Foundation. And so I always tell people that when I'm talking about R, I would say, you know, this is a project, the Health Foundation have taken it on, they've funded it, you know, they've taken it seriously. And I think having that external feedback and that external validation, I think, can really help. Because, you know, the people we're dealing with, we're dealing with IT departments, we're dealing with middle managers. They don't know what R is. They don't care. They just don't want to lose their job, you know. So having that argument is really useful. And the third thing that it's given us, which is more sort of prosaic perhaps, is just funding is just there are loads of analysts out. There are thousands of analysts in the NHS. And many of them, if not all of them, could benefit from R. And it's really hard for them to have the time and the space to learn this stuff, to have a conference, to have webinars, to have training days. And NHSR is, you know, it's not a big funded thing. It's not a big flash thing. And our conference is certainly not big and flash. But it's just about giving enough people enough time just to, you know, have a bit of space to kind of grow and develop. Thanks for that, Chris. That's great. And it really just seemed like the communities helped remove some of that fear and just help people sort of embrace a new way of kind of working and looking at data. Thank you for that. So, Zoe, I was just going to ask you, would you be able to explain a little bit about the foundational principles of NHSR and what makes NHSR so special? Well, the foundation principles, as I understand them to be and how I've benefited from it was from the promotion of R within the NHS, but with a bit of a plus to it as well. So it's not just the NHS. It's also the social care colleagues we have, academic colleagues. So it's actually broader in the scope of who it deals with and also what you can learn through it. But I think what was really key for me was the technical training. I'm an analyst in the NHS. So my main skill set was SQL with some advanced Excel. But having learned R, because it looked really interesting to learn, I found that it was much better for analysis than what I was trying to make SQL do. As time has gone on, I've been sort of learning R along with the support with NHSR community over the two years since it's started. I've found that it was a community really that mattered to me the most. It's a very flat hierarchy that there's a core group of people who work with us and support us. But we're encouraged to have a voice at whatever level of R or even within our organisations. It's a great way of meeting people outside of your organisation. And it sort of fills a gap within our healthcare analysis areas like you have for our ladies and minorities in R. We have that kind of tendency too, but it's also just because we have such a small, quiet voice within the world of analysis. And I think for me, although R is technically really, really interesting and so cool to learn, it's also the grouping that the people that you have around who help and teach you what they know. No, thanks for those insights, Zoe. And like you say, I think that strong sense of community has been a really key driver and kind of allow the NHSR community to achieve what it has done so far. And that's a really good point. So that leaves me quite nicely on to the next question, which is for NHSAsia. So I was just going to ask to NHSAsia about what the key projects and successes have been for NHSR so far and what else is planned for the community? Oh, it's a great question. And it always makes me very proud, I guess, of our community and of all analysts in the community. So we are two years old and so far we had quite a lot of events happening, all of our events are free. And again, thank you to our founder, the Health Foundation. So far we have run 11 two-day training sessions. Topics were absolutely varied from very broad sessions, such as forecasting in R to very medicine-specific, such as analyzing hospital mortality data. We also had run seven webinars. I think at least you imagine them as well. In January, we couldn't expect that the whole world would love your show, but here we are. So it was very well received by our community as well. We also had two conferences. Our last conference was booked in two or three hours. So we had to extend it and our last year conference actually ended up being over two days and we had about 300 participants. So we run workshops. Again, there are 30 workshops on very different topics such as functional programming or presentation. We also had almost 30 talks and about 10 keynote sessions, including sessions from our studio representative. So you can see we did a lot. And at some point we realized we can do that much with our small kind of core team. And that's why we came up with the idea of creating trained trainer course. So we trained other people to deliver training in introduction to R to their local groups. Again, it was before coronavirus and before we actually think that all training could go virtual. So we trained the staff people and I think about half of them already are running training in their area, either virtually or face to face. And we're planning to do the same thing with SHINee in due course. I'm also quite, I want to say that we are very successful in our communications, I mentioned this before. We have Slack and Slack is very active and we have people come and asking questions. We have our Twitter, it's about 2000 followers. It's not possibly too significant number for big organizations, but for us, it's very, very great achievement. We also have been working with RStudio a lot, which I think can be considered a success for us as a small nonprofit organization. So we're working together to build and just our Academy offer. And we're also working together on RStudio Cloud and we use RStudio Cloud a lot in our training sessions. And also there are all these small things which were difficult to count with which I'm the most opposed to ones. So we are helping people a lot. And a few weeks ago, for example, we've had very nice message from one of clinicians in the one of the NHS hospitals who said how helpful are coming towards and how thankful he is that there is a Slack where he's going to answer it. So he managed to create quite interesting report about coronavirus cases in his local hospital and presented in R, rather than do it by Excel. So it's reproducible and much, much easier, I guess, for him to do. And speaking of which successes, we still have virtual conference planning for this November. Now the bars were high with our medicine conference. So we'll have to do a lot of, I guess, trying to catch up with the amazing conference which is running right now. We're also planning to do hackathon sessions. We are hoping to create better collaboration between local areas groups and our ladies. We're also working on increasing NHS solutions. So it's certain packages which would support clinicians and analysts in the NHS, such as funnel package or package for analyzing text data. So yeah, a lot of work to do. And this, I guess, main points for me. Thank you for your question, Alisa. Thanks for that, Anastasia. Like I say, it's quite amazing to look back and think how much we've actually done and achieved in sort of the time that NHSR has been running. It's amazing. And there's a lot of exciting things to come, which is always something to look forward to. But as we know, these sort of things and managing a community, it could be difficult. So my next question was going to be for you, Chris. So what challenges do you see NHSR facing? And how do you think the community can help sort of change or correct some of the mistakes that might have been happening in the past? And how can we make sure that we can sort of face new challenges in future? Yes, well, just before I answer that question, I just want to say that this was originally Tom. So it's not that I bullied everyone on the panel to give me extra space, I'm being confident. So just to make that point, yeah. So I think the thing about, the thing about NHSR is obviously I'm very positive about NHSR. I think we're very much at the beginning of our journey as a community, but also I think a lot of us are literally at the beginning of our journey as our developers. And as I mentioned before, I think that could be a strength, but it does lean towards beginners and intermediates. And I think we maybe need to grow a bit more expertise to have people with the depths of knowledge. So we have people who can answer like, de-play our questions. We can have people who can do that kind of stuff. But I think for the real experts in a particular area, I think we're still lacking that. And that's something that we can build up over time. And that's part of our role, I think. I think that's particularly true when you think about, it's sort of as it's mirrored in the NHS. So as I mentioned at the beginning, although the NHSR is very large, it's made of lots of little things. And some of those organisations have only got sort of one or two analysts. So they find it very hard to draw on that expert knowledge. And that's, I think fragmentation between them within organisations is something that I talk about a lot. And we talk about it later in a couple of hours time, actually, interesting enough, if anyone wants to come back. So I think as a consumer, we've got quite a narrow focus. So I've said pretty much from the beginning that we call ourselves NHSR, I think more rightly we should be called Health and Social Care and NHS and R and Python and Julia and other programming languages. But obviously that's a mouthful. We do have some Python programmers in the group and within the Slack. And we try and be very welcoming to Python and have something to talk about. And I myself am learning Python. But I haven't pushed that agenda so much because I think when people are learning, you bring someone into a Slack workspace and they're starting to learn R and then suddenly you're throwing a different programming language at them, I think that's probably counterproductive. So we're on a journey where that would have any Julia users at all in the Slack group. And I'm keeping courage. I want someone to go off and learn it because I don't have to basically, but that's what I think would be really positive if we had some people doing that too. I think something else that we need to do is think about, and this is again, something that's sort of like a general thing in the world of analysts. It's kind of soft skills and influence and that kind of thing. NHSR, as we've mentioned, is a grassroots thing and it has a lot of community and it's a flat hierarchy. And those are all things to celebrate. But I think we also need to get better as individuals and as a group at kind of punching above our weight, it's strategically in regional groups and that kind of thing and having influence at that kind of level. Because I think although what we can achieve a lot with what we're doing, I think you can achieve even more if you can get your voice. And I think we have been doing that. I'm not saying that we haven't, but I think that's somewhere where we can grow. We have NHS branded projects underway. And again, some of those are quite in the early stages. I myself, I'm working on something and it's in the early stages, partly to be honest, because I've just been too busy doing things. And I think that's part of the other problem as well is that NHSR, it's not a legal entity. It's not an organisation. No one works for NHSR. It's just the group of people who've come together with similar interests. And so it's very hard for us to kind of get things off the ground. So although we have money and we have allocated funding to projects, the people doing those projects, like for example, me and others, have got other full-time jobs to do. So fitting it all around can be challenging. And that's a real shame, but that's the nature of the beast. That's what we're working with. The other thing on the subject of funding is that it's possible, I don't know, the funding is only for a certain amount of time. It's possible we might one day need to adapt to being an organisation with no funding and being effective at that in that way. And I think we could do that. And I think that's something, again, something to celebrate. Because as Zoe was saying, it's about the philosophy and the community. And it's about that. But I think having a bit of money to pay for sandwiches and pay for conference or other stuff is also really important. So that's something that we may have to face in the future. I was gonna say more, but yeah, I think that's probably, we'll probably run into time, aren't we? So I'll hand over now. Thanks for that, Chris. And like you said, there's always gonna be challenges in anything that you do. But I think we've got some really talented people and passionate people in the community and a really driven, passionate founder in Mohammed. So, you know, there's ways it means, isn't it? There's always things you can do better, but I think we've achieved quite a lot so far. I don't know if there are any specific questions that people wanted to ask. But if any, oh yeah, I'd like to see Beth put a note in there. That I can see. But in the meantime, I don't know if any of the panel, if there's anything, you know, anyone else has said that you wanted to respond with ask any kind of final thoughts. Anna Sajor, if you've got any kind of final comments. Yeah, I'm just quick look in the chat and thank you Richard for posting a link to the chat conference. Yes, registration is open. If you want to register, you're very welcome. Yeah, we likely will have morning sessions and also afternoon sessions. So hopefully we will be able to accommodate people from all over the world. And yes, thank you everyone for the nice comments as well around community and people who wonder if they need to join somehow. If you don't have any bookings or anything, you just come over to our website for awesome Twitter, join our Slack, ask questions if you want and hopefully we will be helpful for you and we can all work together from different parts of the world. So this is how I want to say thank you. Thank you for that Anna Sajor. Now I could just say Beth's put a question in there if any of the panel would like to answer that. What have been your biggest roadblocks? I could talk from my point of view in using our in the community. I haven't experienced them, but I've seen others. I think as Chris alluded to, we've got day jobs to do and if you're already entrenched in a particular program that works, like SQL, you need support still to be able to take that time. People from NHSR will be there and readily give their time and their support but you still need that time to use the program, make mistakes and when you're under pressure you can't do that. You have to just continue with what you're doing. There's the recognition of it as well as also was alluded to, but you can do great things but if people don't understand what it is that you've done it and can't done it in and can't reproduce it, they want you to then go back to what they recognize. So it comes back to Microsoft products and SQL specifically or something like Excel or Power BI. And I think it's our culture outside of NHSR is it's just growing in momentum at the moment is not the default way of analyzing things. So I think that comes with it and with that is also people's time trying to get people to volunteer their time is always difficult and it's without that support and recognition of actually this is a really great thing to practice your soft skills with, presenting your data, not your data necessarily, so there'll be some sort of information governance around that but your code sharing that, seeing that that's a really worthwhile thing to do. I think that's for me the biggest roadblock although Chris is my boss, so that's not actually there. It's just disappeared. That's a great question, Zoe. Can you give me one more question and finish this answer and then wrap up? Well, yeah. Well, I was just gonna say something just picking up on what Zoe said. Yeah, I think the thing, for me the number one principle of NHSR it's all about sharing. Like that's what it's all about for me. It's 100% about sharing. And that's a value I think we've sort of picked up from the tech community. That was as I learned that I learned more about that value. And it's really, I find it very ironic that I work in a very large public sector health system where we're not encouraged to cooperate across organizations. So we're not necessarily really encouraged to cooperate within the same organization. We're certainly not encouraged to share code. We're allowed to share code if we beg and plead and do all the things that I've been doing to make sure. And to be fair to my organization who may be watching at some point, they're absolutely great but there are lots that aren't that I won't name. And so I think it's that really, it's the permission to, I think it's very obvious that the way we're working is right, we're helping each other. And as I say, I think you could run HSR for free. I think it would be effective. And I think that's amazing really. But we're doing it sort of or in the early days at least we're doing it in the teeth of opposition that's long standing about protecting IP and protecting staff time and protecting organizational resources and all that kind of stuff. And it's been flying and it's giving us permission to fly in the face of that. No, thank you for that, Chris. That's great. I think, yeah, we're pretty much to time. Yeah. So thank you very much everyone. I've seen a couple of people asking about some of the links and we'll post that in the chat at the side for the website, Slack, things like that. So you've got access to that. So please do get involved and join the discussion. And yeah, thank you very much all. Thank you to the panel as well. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you very much. It was really interesting and I've got some good ideas and we've got a scheduled break right now. So the next session will start at 35 at whatever time zone that is.