Foster an LGBTQ community for R

[revodavid]

R-Ladies has been enormously successful at promoting gender diversity within the R community, and bringing many new women (and their diverse perspectives) into the R community. Can we do something similar for the LGBTQ community?

There are some differences between the communities we'd need to consider:

• The LGBTQ community is much smaller than the R-Ladies community; would the intersection of R and LGBTQ be large enough to sustain a vibrant community?
• On that note, there are many LGBTQ allies in the R community; how could we incorporate allies into this community as well?
• Are there existing LGBTQ communities for data science / machine learning? Perhaps we could form an R community there?
• R-Ladies is already very welcoming to diverse participants generally; perhaps a program within R-Ladies would make the most sense.
• How would LGBTQ participants best like to engage within such a community? Thinking here about private forums vs public forums, etc.
• Other thoughts/issues? (Please suggest in the comments.)

I propose we form a small group to discuss these issues and to make some recommendations for fostering an LGBTQ community as a part of the R community.

[batpigandme]

Couple examples (albeit much more general than this would be):

• https://lesbianswhotech.org/
• https://outintech.com/

[laderast]

As someone who is is part of the LGBTQ community and in the R community, this is worth thinking about. I've often felt a bit compartmentalized in my academic career and my identity, and I would welcome any group supporting both.

[bduckles]

Would love to join this discussion about the LGBTQ community (also including intersex/nonbinary people) and possibly also expanding it to talk about racial/ethnic minority groups as well. How might we talk about welcoming people to the R community who are not cis, hetero white males?

[stefaniebutland]

I'd love to join this discussion with open ears. Safe to say we'd publish an rOpenSci blog post on this if someone / a group decides to write something up after the discussion.

For example, last year, this post by Shannon Ellis https://ropensci.org/blog/2017/06/23/community/ came out of this unconf17 issue that became a lunch time discussion https://github.com/ropensci/unconf17/issues/63.