Welcome to the R-Ladies Philly blog!

Hello and thank you for visiting our brand-new R-Ladies Philly blog! For our first post, we are introducing the founding principles of our chapter and our goals moving forward. With that in mind, if you R ready, here we go!

As you may already know, R-Ladies Philly is a chapter of the broader R-Ladies global organization. R-Ladies global seeks to promote gender diversity in the coding community by providing a collaborative network of R learners, mentors, and leaders. This goal has been instantiated through the formation of regional R-Ladies chapters through Meetup with the express purpose of encouraging, inspiring, and empowering the minorities currently underrepresented in the R community. We formed the R-Ladies Philly chapter in 2018 because we think our city and the diversity of people in it are pretty great!

With this background in mind, R-Ladies Philly is a free, community-driven group that is open to all levels of R users. While our group name does have ‘Ladies’ in the title, we welcome all individuals who share our values. Our monthly meetings are skills-focused, with encouragement of interdisciplinary statistical and coding methods through application to open-source datasets pertaining to Philadelphia and the surrounding area. This approach allows us to provide hands-on workshops, leadership opportunities to share skills and expertise, and networking opportunities to meet and connect with local and global R-Ladies.

Because we are community driven, we provide volunteer opportunities for our members and encourage members to take on leadership roles. If you are interested in how you can help, contact us at philly@rladies.org. To get involved, join our MeetUp page, attend our meetings, follow us on Twitter (and soon GitHub), and, of course, keep track of our progress on our blog!