The Value of Welcome, part 2: How to prepare 40 new community members for an unconference

Author: Stefanie Butland

I’ve raved about the value of extending a personalized welcome to new community members and I recently shared six tips for running a successful hackathon-flavoured unconference. Building on these, I’d like to share the specific approach and (free!) tools I used to help prepare new rOpenSci community members to be productive at our unconference. My approach was inspired directly by my AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program training.

Read the rest at: https://ropensci.org/blog/2017/12/01/unconf-welcome/

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13/10 helpful af!

Seriously, though: having that first f2f (albeit our digital faces) made such a huge difference, both in terms of alleviating my newcomer’s anxiety and (~related) my ability to hit the ground running. :running_woman:

As insanely difficult as it must have been to schedule all of these (@stefanie, you give too much credit to Calendly, I’m sure), it was also great :star2: that these were just part of the process (I hate the word mandatory, but that’s kind of what I mean). Had it been a matter of “if you have more questions and want to chat beforehand…” I would’ve felt like it was an imposition.

So, basically, everything you know to be true and wrote in that post I agree with. (Giving it a :heart: or +1 didn’t seem like enough!)

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Oh @mara, you have more than made my day :green_heart:. I’m SO ready to do it all over again!

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