rOpenSci thrives because of volunteer contributions from community members – submitting and reviewing R packages, serving as editors for software peer review, writing blog posts, sharing information about packages and resources, contributing code and documentation and answering others’ questions. Recently our fiscal sponsor, NumFOCUS, gave us an opportunity to nominate two contributors for recognition at the NumFOCUS annual summit. Sometimes all we can do is publicly express our gratitude for the people who help make our software robust and sustainable, and make our community a welcoming place that adds value to people’s experiences.

Thank you Melina Vidoni and Will Landau for your rich volunteer contributions to rOpenSci.

Melina Vidoni

Melina Vidoni joined rOpenSci’s team of software peer review editors in 2019. She immediately began making contributions beyond that volunteer role, showing leadership in broadening the reach and accessibility of rOpenSci and the R language. Melina has a PhD in Information Systems Engineering and is a Lecturer in Computer Science & Software Engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. In 2018 she founded R-Ladies Santa Fe, Argentina. Within one month of moving from Argentina to Australia in June 2019, Melina moderated an rOpenSci Community Call on involving multilingual communities in our peer review process and open source projects and gave a talk on “Open science through rOpenSci” at R-Ladies Melbourne. Melina voluntarily took on a larger editorial workload by taking a rotation as Editor in Chief for rOpenSci software peer review. Melina has been active in broadening the reach of R and rOpenSci to underrepresented groups around the world. She is part of the team who translated the seminal online book “R for Data Science”, by Hadley Wickham, into Spanish. Melina is a role model for so many in the R and open source communities.

Will Landau

Will Landau is an outstanding advocate for rOpenSci while making truly valuable technical and community contributions. Will is the creator and maintainer of the drake R package for reproducible workflows at scale, which passed rOpenSci software peer review and was published in JOSS. He is a Research Scientist in Indianapolis, Indiana at Eli Lilly and Company where he develops methods and software for statisticians and has PhD in Statistics from Iowa State University. Will is perhaps the ideal example of a developer who is proactive in seeking input on his work, actively listening, and quickly, thoroughly, and warmly responding to feedback through multiple channels, and incorporating that feedback in his work. Will’s documentation is outstanding. In September 2019, Will presented drake in an rOpenSci Community Call attended by 65 people from 8 countries and wrote up answers to everyone’s questions following the event. The real prompt for nominating Will, is his generosity in continually giving public credit and appreciation to people and organizations with whom he has collaborated. He is an excellent role model and inspiration in the open source scientific computing movement.

Read about other recipients of the 2019 NumFOCUS awards and new contributor recognition.