Looking at the slides: https://cascadia-r.github.io/cascadia_r_then_now/#/title-slide
I think the story goes back further than the gigantic beer pub.
It turns out there were lots of strands: Jessica, had we met at Rstudio Conf’s workshop by Jenny Bryan? [Yes!! Well I think we knew each other from R meetups beforehand, but we definitely did that together and maybe how we started talking about this]
Chester and I met at the Portland R meetup. For years it had been OHSU-based, but Scott Chamberlain had taken it on and it was thriving.
Chester was doing R support at Reed college. He contacted Hadley to see if he’d do a talk. It turned out to be cheap and easy because “Hadley had family in the area”. That’s how we heard and possibly met Charlotte. [this is how Jessica met Chester =)]
The purpose of the conference was to expand the conversation — Get Charlotte and her students to connect, but also bring diverse R users from all over the place together. Getting people to “see each other” was important.
The Craggy idea was kind of like tidy Tuesday… See how different people visualized the same dataset — and identify lighting talks. Charlotte’s was one of the lighting talks.
We tried to be transparent all along: what were the ingredients, how were we gathering to learn from each other. The value of “seeing the community” is that all the different threads can come together: people who may not have recognized each other as partners, all of a sudden had a common purpose.
My 2 cents.
JM 2 cents:
idea that having created this community before the pandemic carried us through, even though many of us scattered and became isolated, being able to come back again to this is very encouraging and healing
volunteers and people who are passionate about this community are what keeps it going, people come and go but the spirit remains
do we have the hex logos for all conferences? a little more detail about the 2017 and 2018 location and # of attendees
future -- get out of portland
values were continued on through downstream conferences
covid = virtual = more accessible
nice show of the community
look for some photos, maybe of craggy
add last names of organizers with photos
photos of the organizers
goal: find the balance of local community with large enough to support a conference, find ways to increase accessibility to underrepresented groups, young people who don't know how to enter field of R/stats/data sci
call on people to get involved, give a talk even if 5 minutes, on something you learned or something you did, maybe everyone knows that function but probably a couple others who do not