rOpenSci Champions Second Cohort: Projects Wrap-Up

As we welcome the third cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program, our second cohort has now completed the second phase of the program. In this article, we share each Champion’s project, their achievements, and their outreach activities.

Champions’ Projects

In their applications Champions choose to develop a new package or to participate in the review process as authors or reviewers.

New packages

• Andrea Gomez Vargas, from Argentina, developed the package arcenso, to provide access to the official data of the national population censuses in Argentina from the National Institute of Statistics and Census – INDEC, and to make this historical census data available, homogenized, and ready to use. Her mentor was Luis Verde from Mexico. You can learn more about the package in the blog post Andrea wrote about her project and her journey on the program.

• Francesca Belem Lopes Palmeira, from Brazil, developed a new package called pcir: ‘Potential for Conflict Index – PCI’, which is a descriptive statistical method used to enhance the understanding of outcomes in human dimensions research. The package equips users with the tools required for calculating, comparing, and graphing the potential for conflict. Her mentor was Bruna Wundervald from Brazil.

• Sunny Tseng, from Taiwan, now living in Canada, developed bbsTaiwan. This is an R package to streamline Taiwan Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data retrieval and analysis. bbsTaiwan facilitates data access from GBIF, where Taiwan BBS data are stored. Users can tailor species analysis, controlling data stratification, preparation, and mapping. Sunny’s mentor was Eunseop Kim from South Korea, now living in the USA.

• Erika Siregar, from Indonesia, worked on developing rplaywright an R package seamlessly bridge with the NodeJS library, Playwright, enabling simplified web testing and automation for R users. This package aims to provide R users with a comprehensive toolkit for interacting with web browsers programmatically, allowing for tasks such as browser automation, web scraping, and end-to-end testing directly from within the R environment. Her mentor was Apoor Anand from India.

Improving and reviewing existing packages

• Ezekiel Adebayo Ogundepo from Nigeria, worked on the bulkreadr package, which is a package designed to optimize the process of importing and processing large datasets, providing compatibility with several file formats from a range of statistical software and spreadsheets. Ezekiel worked on enhanced functions functionality and launched the official website of the package. His mentor was Francisco Cardozo from Colombia.

• Liz Hare from the US, worked as reviewer on the software peer review of the emodnet.wfs package, that provides helpers to access EMODnet Web Feature Service data through R. Her mentor was François Michonneau from France.

• Sehrish Kanwal, from Australia, worked to improve the RNAsum R package, an RNA-seq reporting workflow designed to post-process, summarise, and visualize outputs. Sehrish worked on the package and a paper about it. The package website presents more information on the package’s functionalities. Her mentor was Emi Tanaka from Australia.

• Jacqui Levy, from Canada, worked on the icicle package to tidy and calculate ice cycle variables from thousands of open-source hydrological stations that are managed by the Water Survey of Canada. This R package will give scientists the tools to assess ice cycle variables and how they might be changing over time for any river station. Her mentor was Jonathan Keane, from the US.

• Binod Jung Bogati, from Nepal, worked on the nepalcensus package, which provides a comprehensive and up-to-date tool for accessing and exploring demographic, socio-economic, and geographic data collected during the most recent census conducted in Nepal. The package aims to facilitate data analysis and visualization for researchers, policymakers, and anyone interested in understanding and utilizing census data effectively for various applications and insights. His mentor was Erle Holgersen from Canada.

Outreach Activities

Our Champions carried out a wide range of outreach activities including talks, conference papers, workshops, blog articles, community calls and meetups. The objective of these activities was to share what they did and what they learned during the program with their communities beyond rOpenSci.

Outreach activities commenced in August 2024, involved local communities (universities, RUGs, R-Ladies Chapters, conferences, and organizations), and were delivered in the Champions’ native/preferred languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese).

Liz Hare, member of this cohort worked together with Cagri, a champion from the first cohort to do outreach activities and also introduce their cohort mates to other communities and organizations giving them space to share what they did during the Champions Program. Victor Ordu, first cohort champion, participated in the Unilorin meetup organized by Ezekiel, speaking about Hands-On Data Cleaning in R with Regular Expressions.

Champions worked with their local communities to organize different kinds of events and spaces:

• Sunny organized a workshop to teach how to use the package she developed during the champions program in Taiwan.
• Ezekiel submitted a proposal to the R Consortium to create the Unilorin R user Group, which received partial funding to get it started. After a successful year of operation, with 5 events held and more than 600 members, the group was awarded another R Consortium grant to continue its activities during 2025.
• Andrea organized several events in Argentina, including a talk at the R-Ladies Buenos Aires chapter and the RenBaires R user Group about the arcenso package and the Champions Program.
• Sehrish shared her experience on the rOpenSci Champions Program at the webinar Championing omics data analysis through Open science, Mentoring and Innovating tool at the Australian National University.
• Francesca organize a meetup with R-Ladies Floripa to introduce her package pcir and shared the workshop materials openly.

rOpenSci’s community spaces also benefited from the participation of the champions:

• Sunny participated as a panelist in the community call From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS telling about her experience developing the bbsTawian package as a project in the Champions Program. She also become a reviewer for rOpenSci’s software peer review.
• Andrea participated in the Community Call in Spanish Fostering Open Science in Latin America – rOpenSci Champions Program sharing her experience during the Champions Program with people interested in applying to the next cohort. As a co-orgaizer of R en Buenos Aires RUG, she organize the meetup Shit, Git! How to handle Errors in Git and not died trying in Spanish, helping with the new material for the next cohort training.
• Ezekiel participated as a mentor in the Coworking Mini-Hackathon for First-Time Contributors, helping people do their first contributions to R packages.
• Francesca was the main host of our first community call in Portugues The R community speaks Portuguese and also one of the mentors of our Tradução + Hackathon = Traslaton rOpenSci during LatinR 2024.

Champions also wrote blog posts for rOpenSci’s website covering technological aspects such as “Resources For Using R With Screen Readers” by Liz Hare and also aspects such as the experience of being part of the program, such as “Bridges and Communities. My Journey as an rOpenSci Champion” by Andrea Vargas Gomez.

Academic publications are also part of the outcomes of the Champions work. For example, Sehrish Kanwal published a paper about the RNAsum R package.

LatinR, useR!, Posit, Big Team Science and several other conferences were attended by our champions. For example, Andrea presented the package she developed during the program at the Latin American Conference on the Use of R in R&D and the Government Advances in Statistical Programming Conference. In addition Sunny, Andrea and Erika received scholarships to attend Posit Conf 2024 and Sunny and Andrea were able to participate. Erika and Andrea also presented their respective packages developed during the program at useR! 2025. Liz will present rOpenSci Develop, Package and Peer Review Guide at Big Team Science Conference 2025.

Champions’ accomplishments and next steps

Our Champions have been very successful, and have gained a lot from their projects and from their relationships with their mentors and their cohort mates. The impact of their work has enriched their home institutions, their local communities and rOpenSci Community. Their outreach activities shared information and knowledge in local ajd international contexts, and fostered productive spaces such as R user groups.

Many of our Champions will continue with their outreach activities and maintenance of their R package. Stay updated about their activities through our events and talks section in our website, our newsletter and social media!