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

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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.
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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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