 I'm really excited to be talking about data communities and those who built them. I'm also excited for this Our Ladies Chicago power session with Catherine and me. So having that representation is very, very exciting. I'm going to start off with a little bit about me and then jump into some insights that I've pulled from working with various data communities. You can find these slides at bit.ly slash 2020-05-csvconf. If you want to find them, I've also tweeted about them. And you can use them for reference later. All right, so who am I and what communities do I build? I want to start off with a little bit of intro here because I think that's always interesting and relevant, especially if you're talking about building data communities. Introducing myself. I'm currently a researcher at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. I'm also in my free time, the maintainer community lead for the Carpentries. So this is something that I actually got written into my job. So five hours a week, I'm working for the Carpentries. I highly recommend this as a tactic if you want to work with a community, have your boss sign up on your work with that community. One thing that I'm very passionate about is thinking about underrepresented minorities in data communities. I do a lot of work thinking about how to make those communities more diverse, organizing things, trying to bring people into the fold. And you can find me at Civic Angela. This is sort of a remnant from what I did like an internship at a place called Civic Hall Labs and thinking about civic technology. So that's also been in the back of my head for a while. So as a data community builder, I'm bringing skills into my communities that have been with me before I even started working with data. So I'm thinking about my early days as a community builder. This is a picture of me working with a sort of positivity project called Make Chicago Smile. So this was back when I was still in school. One big thing that we pulled out from this was basically how to get people to organize together around a common mission and do things. So this was before I really even dove into data. And I learned a lot of lessons from just this early community building. Things I learned included how to get people to help out, how to plan a large-scale event, how to build volunteer teams, how to share out your work. Don't forget to take photos. And I'm happy to talk specifically about tactics for each of these. But I think today's talk is going to be a little bit more about the broader picture from working with a number of these communities. Recent days as a data community builder, here's some photos from recent events. Left is a workshop that I taught for Our Lady Chicago about data visualization with maps. We had a bunch of people come out and learn. On the right is another workshop that I've taught with amazing Our Lady Stephanie Kermer, and we did a package workshop. I think Katherine is in this photo somewhere potentially. Oh no, she's the one taking the photo. So she's behind the scenes in this one. And we taught people how to write our packages in a weekend workshop. So very, very happy about that sort of thing. So I believe that community building is a skill just like anything else. I think the second talk of the morning about research software communities mentioned this. Basically, a lot of the people that you're working with have skills specifically in data or in technical fields. And they don't necessarily have the background in terms of community building specifically. So thinking that through, I believe it's a skill that you can accomplish, get through practice. So this is something that I picked up from the Carpentries, thinking about things as skills and various contexts. So I think thinking about it as a skill, I think there are two parts to community building. And I think this is true of most things. There's the vision and then there's the strategy. And lest this become just business buzzwords, I think this is sort of the big ideas and then the get-and-get done. I actually had a lot of trouble writing this talk because I wanted to write a talk specifically on how to get it done because I'm someone who loves details, loves thinking through a communications plan or how we're going to make this event, like how we're going to order the pizza and then do all this. But I realized that would be a very boring talk in terms of data communities and it might be not relevant to your specifically. So I'm going to talk about three big ideas that I think I pulled out from the communities that I've worked with. And those communities are, as I mentioned, our ladies, the Carpentries, which have already gotten so many shout-outs already. And then my specific research center, the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. Quick overview of these in case you don't know what they are, our ladies is a meetup for gender minorities. These the programming language are. There's a local chapter structure. This is similar to things like Pi Ladies. Like I think there's one called Map Time. They're sort of informal meetups around the world. Differently, the Center for Spatial Data Science is my research center at the University of Chicago. We're focused on spatial analysis and open source software development. So we build a tool called Geota that helps with exploratory spatial data analysis. And we are heavily involved with social science research. So I'm currently doing work on the opioid epidemic. This is my job. It's sort of funny that I put it second, but I think it will, it maps well to sort of the topics I want to talk about. And then the most recent community that I've been involved with is the Carpentries. So this is a volunteer initiative, nonprofit teaching, computational skills to researchers around the world. As I said before, this is my sort of job, but I love their vision. I love sort of what they're doing and I want to get more involved. So when I was thinking about this talk, the things that stood out to me from these communities were three main ideas. And I think I asked myself, why do they work and what do they have in common? And I can't say that these are the, this is all of it, but I think there are three big ideas, which are excitement, empathy and kindness. So I'm going to start off with talking about excitement. I'm a pretty excited person. I think people have told me that that's something that I bring to a community is that my enthusiasm is something that they're excited about. But I want to talk a bit about Our Lady of Chicago. So this was like the most exciting. And I think this is most relevant when you're building or starting a community, building that momentum and getting started. So on the left, we have a picture of our launch. So this was the first event we ever did. We basically pulled it together in like three weeks, which I'm still astonished by. On the right is one of my friends who baked an R pie for the first event. So we had something sort of fun and exciting and just inspired people to get involved and see that things were happening. We had two amazing speakers and we filled up the entire room, got a lot of stickers. I think you could see them on the table. And people were excited. The momentum from that kickoff event led to a lot of good collaboration down the road. This is why things like sprints, things like workshops are important, getting people in the room and discussing and building that excitement and momentum is really, really valuable when you're building a community. So my question to you is how you can build excitement into your community, whether that's a kickoff event, whether that's sort of doing things that the people in your community value. And that might vary. So I found when I was teaching workshops that people find like really cool visualizations in my workshops and seeing those exciting and maybe not as exciting some of the data structures behind it. However, based on the first talk of this morning, that's exciting to some people thinking about metadata and schemas. Like that is exciting to many people and you might know that if you're someone who's excited, right? So in my experience, like some of my researchers are definitely more excited about the visualization than they are the data, but knowing your community is a big part of that. Similarly, maybe it's exciting to have a bunch of people in the room and maybe it's not so exciting to install R in your free time. However, maybe documentation is exciting to you and that's something that you should keep in mind as well. So knowing that need in your community I think is something that brings me to my next point which is empathy. Basically what is empathy? Knowing sort of what your problems like what the problems are of the people in your community and how you might understand like their frustrations, their needs and things like that. I think this is especially valuable if you have been there yourself. So early days of me doing data analysis, this graph of frustration and time I would get extremely frustrated in a very short amount of time. And I still remember, you know, like not being able to like do anything with my data not being able to figure out, you know how to make this visualization that I really wanted to. And in my mind, you know, when would I ever get to this point where I was like doing things and not getting frustrated, right? One tool that really helped me in my early days was this resource called R for Data Science. I think it's an awesome book. It's a really good place to start if you're learning R specifically for data analysis for the first time. And I think the reason, one reason that it is so good is because the people who wrote it had empathy for the problems that people like me, researchers, people who had to analyze data were tackling. And the reason for that is actually really interesting. I read an interview of Hadley Wickham who's the guy who co-wrote this book and also played a big author role in GD Plot 2 and other R tools. And actually what he says is during his, I think PhD days, he got a consulting position where I helped students from other departments to do statistical analysis. This gave me a steady stream of people with statistics problems. And so he was seeing people come in with issues reshaping their data, issues visualizing in the way that they wanted to. These were problems that he saw over and over and over again as a statistical consultant. And so he decided to write software to basically fill those gaps and to think about how can we make this better? You don't have to go out there and write open source software and put it out to the world. You can if that's what you're great at. But I think a key lesson from this is how can you develop empathy within your community? And one way to do that of course is hearing people's problems. So this ties into some of the work that I've done at the University of Chicago. I teach these weekly workshops and I've done it for two years about spatial analysis, specifically for social scientists. So we're like mapping things. We're doing spatial analysis trying to figure out point and polygon things. And so on the left is me just like delivering my workshop feeling happy about my material. And then on the right is the real reality of what happens next after I deliver that workshop. It is sitting down, trying to figure out why exactly the Spatial Package Boat install, you know, figuring out this like very convoluted system that people have for a spatial data and like trying to work through that. And I think that really, really helped with my empathy for thinking through some of these cases. You may not be in a position where you can do that, where you can, you know, teach something and then immediately get feedback from people for what their issues are. But I think what is important is asking at least people in your community, what are the stakeholders? What do they care about? What are their big problems? What are things that they have issues with, you know, what data problems are they facing that could be tackled in a short amount of time that might have big impact? And having that empathy, I think is a starting point for really strong data communities. My final point is thinking about as we build empathy, it's important that people feel comfortable asking questions of you and bringing their problems to you, which brings me to kindness. This is the last point, but I think it is the most important one. And I think every community that you are part of should be a kind one, specifically for newcomers, but also to people who've been there for a long time. I bought this idea sort of from teaching tech together, another amazing free resource, highly recommend you check it out by Greg Olson. And the first sort of page, or I guess like the first webpage that you see in there has a list of 10 rules. And the first rule is be kind all else's details. I think this is a really, really good place to start. So if you are starting from a place of kindness, empathy with your communities, problems and understanding, I think the rest you can figure out how to run an event or you can figure out how to lead specific people through the package development process, but you're gonna start with this foundation of kindness. So my question is, how can you prioritize kindness as a key value in your community? I want you to leave you with that and sort of thinking about that, some sort of off the cuff ideas, make sure you don't tolerate unkindness in your community, make sure that that's not accepted, right? And that might be through a code of conduct, which the CSVComp organizers have so done a great job with and introduced that and set that as the norm. But it also starts with you being kind to others and you being kind to yourself. So I'm gonna talk about this because I think this is often overlooked in data community discussions, self-care and self-kindness. You're gonna be doing amazing work. You have the right to stop, take a break or leave when you need to. And this is coming from places where I've seen people working in communities for a long, long, long time and they get burnt out. And what happens is that because they haven't been kind to themselves, it's really hard for them to be kind to others and you start seeing people get crispy and sort of being harsh to newcomers and things like that. So it's really, really important that you are kind to yourself and what you could do as you build these communities. On the flip side of that, I think the flip side of being kind to yourself and stepping back a bit is that you have the privilege to bring others along so that they can grow. Maybe you stepping back means that, yes, you are less involved, but it also means that you can bring up a new generation and mentor people in your data community. I think this is especially valuable when you have helped someone come a long way, maybe they're now doing reproducible things. Now they're like opening their data and they're really excited about all of that. They are the perfect person to become the next leader of your community and to grow and to grow that community. So just a few thoughts there. So my three takeaways, excitement, empathy and kindness. And I think what you have all of these three things, they lead to something which is exciting and should be in all your communities, which is belonging. I think every community day I'm part of, I feel like I deeply and truly belong there and it's been amazing. It's totally changed my work. It's really helped me meet others doing similar things and finding other community builders is also a good part of this. So I guess maybe not the final question, but how can you stay focused and belonging in your community? I think this should come up naturally if you focus on the other three things. So I'm just a few thoughts there. One term that I found really useful in terms of thinking about belonging is communities of practice. So I would just Google search this term. This book is also helpful. I don't think it's free, but I learned about communities of practice from talking to Ted Luderis, who's an amazing educator at Oregon Health and Science, I think university. And he basically said to me in a private discussion, I think the key to educational sustainability is to build a community of practice. So I'm gonna leave you with that term to think about as you go forward as well to Google and find all these things about. But I think that's a really good way to frame it. People doing similar things and similar areas working together to increase their knowledge and understanding. So keep on building community, keep on getting feedback and keep working to make things better. You can find me on Twitter. You can find my website and I'm on very, very, very many slacks. I'll be on the CSV5 Q&A. I'm on the Our Ladies one. There's another one for scientific community builders that I'm on called, I think the Center for Scientific Community or something and communications and engagement. That's good. And if you're interested, I'm gonna put a plug in here and joining another virtual conference. We're running a conference on May 30th for USARS in the Chicago land area. So feel free to join me there and thank you so much. Thank you so much, Angela. That was fantastic. I learned so much and hope to help build my communities as well. We have time for a few questions. Are you okay to answer a few of them? Yeah. Awesome. So several people in the chat have asked, do you have suggestions for pitching to your employer to get this kind of work added to your job description? It is hard to get approval for dedicated time to train people. Yeah, I feel like I'm not the perfect person to answer questions about this because my employers have always been so, I think they've seen the value of having a community or I think they were the people who were like, maybe we should do some workshops because people are struggling. I think one thing that I've heard from others is that sort of some quick wins and showing what you could do with this community is. So basically like thinking about, I think someone told me that they wrote a package that helped automate 20% of the work that someone was doing and then it turned out that the company wanted the rest of the team to use that package. So thinking about, how can you show that you're making impact and then how can you make the case that that impact will be scaled if you have more people or like you're, I think like having something that is like, hey, like I'm doing this and like this will make us more efficient, this will make us 20 times more productive or something like that. I'm not the perfect person to talk about this. All right. Another question is, how do we generate excitement in the absence of an initial in-person meetup? Any advice there? Yeah, that's hard. I feel like that's something that we're all thinking about sort of virtual meetings and things. And I can't say that I figured out the right way to do it. I do think like getting everyone into the room in some way is important because like you get sparks between people like people are talking and like whether that's a video meeting or thinking about some sort of online launch, there've been a lot of people who've been doing work on this lately. And I think people in the chat might have ideas but I think like getting some FaceTime and not having it totally be asynchronous is important. Awesome. Let's see here, questions. I'm already skimming, I'm ready. So, love the negotiation, Tatek? Nope, did we already answer that one? I think we did. Clearly, I'm not very good at this. Apologies everybody, I'm learning, I'm learning. Everyone's commenting about your energy, that's fantastic. Yes, yes, empathy and excitement is very contagious. Let's see here. Can you say more about kindness and community building? It's not something you can enforce in the manner of a code of conduct and in global communities with very broad set of cultures represented, kindness, empathy, especially online can look very different. Yeah, I think like this is something that I think starts from you as the community, like as someone who is managing that community. So for me, a big part of it is gratitude. So when someone does something amazing, I say, thank you, like that was awesome. And I believe it, I'm like, oh my gosh, this person started with one question like one month ago and now they're leading a workshop. And I think being grateful for what people put in and acknowledging that is a big part of it for me. So that's been a tool that I've used in terms of, we ran a meetup, I thank every single person, I tell them what they did that I really appreciated. That's a big part of the kindness. And I think this other point about cultural differences is also important to take into consideration. I've worked across cultures, I think specifically with the Carpentries and they're just different norms for how people interact and just being aware of those norms and laying them out in the open is really good. For example, I think like, I'm trying to think of something like maybe Americans are a little bit more blunt with their feedback in some way than like East Asian cultures. And as someone who identifies with both, thinking about sort of the distinction there is important. And yeah, so two ideas on that. Awesome. Another question is how do you step back? How to step back when you are ready? Do you have any advice on that? Yeah, stepping back. I think this is something that I've been working through myself recently. I think a big part of it is trusting other people. You know, like I think there is part of me that's like, oh, I could do this like really efficiently and really well, I know what to do. But keeping in mind that you being there sometimes is preventing other people from having a chance to grow. So thinking about how you can coach and lead people to a way where they can become big players and important contributors in your community. It's something that I have trouble with, you know, like figuring out what to delegate and you know, like stepping back entirely and trusting that my team will take it on. And I think for those of us who are really good at putting together communities, it's something that we don't wanna step back, you know, like we wanna keep working on it. But for me, sometimes it's like another thing has come up and I realized there's just no way I could do like everything at once. So I have to, you know, move back and off board myself. And like on the flip side, like people get to learn new things and they get to become leaders and it becomes their project, which is exciting. So. Fabulous.