Rachael Dempsey - Building & Engaging your Data Science Community

Hi, everybody. Let me share my screen with you real quickly. Well, hi everybody. I'm Rachael Dempsey and I lead customer marketing at Posit. We build enterprise and open source tools for people who do data science with R and Python. We're also the company formerly called RStudio. I like to add that in there sometimes.

But thank you to the R and Pharma team for reaching out to me to open up the third day of the conference and talk a bit about one of my favorite things, community. So as I'm sure you've seen here this week, communities are an amazing way to learn, collaborate and make work a bit more fun. So with all the great connections this week, we wanna keep that going. And I know the Pharma group is great at that.

Data science hangout

And I get to spend a lot of time with people from the Pharma community in our weekly data science hangout that I wanted to share with you. And so this is our gathering place for the community held every Thursday at 12 Eastern time. And we chat about data science leadership, career lessons, workflows and much more. So I'd love to have you join us at that if you're not already. You're always welcome to listen in if you want. You can join in the conversation in the chat or live or ask questions anonymously too.

So when I say I get to spend a lot of time with people in Pharma at the hangout, I wanted to say a huge thank you to so many of you from the community here who have joined as featured leaders over the years. And I wanted to share this with you here too to encourage you to check out some of their recordings as well, because there's a lot to learn from this crew here.

Well, I did say we have the hangout every single Thursday. Next Thursday is a bit different because we have a webinar on GSK's Our Journey from Pilot Projects to Enterprise Adoption. So I'm really excited to hear from Andy, Ben and Becca. And you can add this specific event to your calendar with the short link here on the screen.

Building your own community

So while I'm here and I love getting to talk about events where we're all joining together, I wanted to spend a few minutes this morning or afternoon, evening, wherever you are talking about building your own communities. And I've spoken to a lot of people who want to start something within their own organizations and just aren't really sure how to get started. So I have some resources here to share with you.

I had made a Quarto site a bit back with lessons learned from teams like Pfizer who have their own internal data science hangout, Regeneron, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and many more. This Quarto site has tips, examples for events and we'll also let you know how to join our Community Builder Coffee Hour where we get together once a month as organizers to share tips and help each other in challenges.

Tips for starting a community

Eight minutes is not much time to dive into this but if you're thinking about starting your own community, I wanted to leave you with a few tips here.

So first, start small. I think you can have a tendency to think that a larger audience means a better event. And I don't think that's true. Starting small is really important for building the culture that you want for your group. It helps you in getting people to know each other but also that core group of people will help you maintain the culture as your event grows or as your community grows. I think with the hangouts, we started with 20 people in the beginning and this is also really important for being intentional about growing a diverse group from the beginning and allows you to adapt based on feedback you receive.

So one, starting small is good. Two, consistency is crucial for building relationships with your group. So I recommend whatever you're planning, keep regular consistency, which allows members to jump on when it fits into their schedule. That doesn't have to be every single week like the science hangouts, but maybe it's one month. People then know what to expect.

So I gave a talk on what I learned about community building from growing up in a bar at Posit Conf a few years ago. And I call this consistency piece, finding your taco Tuesday. So that doesn't mean people will come to every single event but when they're free, they know exactly where they can go. It's important to point out here that just because you hold events consistently does not mean that everybody's just gonna show up right away. It takes time for things to catch on. So I think with the hangout, it took about five weeks for a core group of repeat attendees to emerge.

finding your taco Tuesday. So that doesn't mean people will come to every single event but when they're free, they know exactly where they can go.

Third, standardize where you can. Find the areas where you can spend less mental energy on the planning by setting things up for yourself ahead of time and setting a process for anything that you have to do ahead of time. And this took me a little bit to learn, but first with consistency, when you have the same day and time, it becomes easier to schedule speaker because you can just give them a few options and you having to go back and forth with people.

One that really helped me on the standardizing piece is creating a Google form to collect speakers information. So like their title, bio, picture, recording approval. So you have it all in one spot. I was actually just like emailing people back and forth to start and this made a huge difference. Little things like creating a template email invite as a placeholder when someone says yes, they're ready to be a featured speaker because you can put all the details and everything in that invite and you never have to think about it again for each person.

Other things like writing out your intros, you're making sure you're welcoming people and a point of welcoming people.

Number four is always welcome people and get clear how they can interact. I've learned it's important to really tell people this is what this event is. This is what to expect. This is who the events are for. So if you're hoping beginner will join, let them know that. A welcoming environment may look a lot different to you as an organizer than it does to a new attendee. So it can be helpful to reach out to a few people that have joined your events and ask if they may be open to giving feedback. One way to do that is I just send a quick note to a few people every week to say thank you for joining and just open the door to a conversation. Good best practice here for making sure your event is welcoming is just take a second to remind yourself at the beginning that this might be somebody's first time here and if it is, what should they know?

Okay, last one here, plan ahead. I know this is something that gets easier as time goes, but I highly recommend trying to set out a schedule for like four weeks to two months out to give yourself some leeway in planning and take off the pressure of every single week, having to make sure you're locking something down. And it's always easier to find someone who can agree to an event over a month away. So when you connect with people through your community group and you ask them, hey, would you be interested in being a featured leader or a speaker at some point in the future? You can give them options like two months out and people are much more likely to say yes if you gave them something two months out and then just keep that spreadsheet of people lined up and if they have to switch, that's okay.

So those are my five tips for you this morning. I love getting to talk about community building with you all. So if you'd like to continue the conversation, please don't hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to chat with you or see you at a data science hangout too. There's a great keynote talk coming now by Christina Elmore at GSK. So you'll have to leave this room, go jump into that other room there, but have a great rest of your day everybody.