R Epidemics Consortium Newsletter
We’re delighted to welcome you to the first issue of the RECON newsletter. The last two years have really shown the importance of coming together as a community to tackle global issues and we appreciate your membership of our growing vibrant community and thank you for your continued support. We are trialling this newsletter as a new way to keep everyone up to date with our work, training opportunities, and as a way to connect with and learn about the work of other RECON members.
In this issue: Updates from the general assembly, new board member, volunteer opportunities, and a 2021 year in review.
Latest News
2021 General Assembly
The yearly general assembly took place on Zoom on December 8th 2021. After a summary of all RECON activities for 2020-2021, steps for the future of RECON and its members were mentioned and discussed with the present members. A new board was also voted in, with the first and foremost task of this board to redefine RECON's vision and find new ways to integrate its members into its daily activities. For those who could not attend the General Assembly and wished to watch it, the recording of the video can be found here.
New board member
We welcome to the board Noam Ross as our new Vice-President. Noam is Principal Scientist for Computational Research at EcoHealth Alliance and leads software peer-review at rOpenSci. Says Noam:
I'm excited to join the RECON board and play a part in helping get all of its excellent tools into the hands of more field and epidemiologists worldwide. RECON has a tremendous tremendous user base and a lot of volunteer energy we can tap to make it an even more sustainable, equitable, and participation-driven organization.
Volunteer opportunities
Based on feedback from the General Assembly, we're putting together a list of areas where we can use more member's help in software, training, and community development. Look out for a specific call to action in our next update!
If you have a project to propose or would otherwise be interested in getting involved with existing projects, please do get in touch at admin@repidemicsconsortium.org.
2021 overview
Training
With many involved in the response to Covid-19, 2021 has definitely been a difficult year for our members so it was excellent to see a training workshop being run by RECON members: a fully online 5-day Intro to R workshop for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) led by trainers David Jorgensen and Olivia Boyd running from 26-30 April 2021 with 18 sign-ups.
If you are interested in either having a session at your organisation, or becoming involved as a trainer, please get in touch with our training coordinator Janetta at admin@repidemicsconsortium.org or janetta.skarp@repidemicsconsortium.org !
Package updates
Members of the RECON have, for many years, been creating resources and software that could be used to inform the response to disease outbreaks, health emergencies and humanitarian crises. During this time, as well as providing training materials, running workshops and having members deployed to the field to help with data analytics, a variety of R packages have been created to enable analysts to quickly solve the problems they have (e.g. epicontacts, epiestim, incidence).
Since the early days of RECON, the landscape of packages for the analysis of epidemics has grown, evolved and diversified, benefiting from feedback and contributions from our members as well as other groups. While such organic growth was needed and resulted in overall improvements of available tools, it has also led to a less consistent software landscape, with several packages overlapping or duplicating efforts, limited interoperability, and varying coding and development standards. Being aware that fragmented software landscapes can be the bane of data scientists (e.g. Excoffier and Heckel 2006), we realise there is also benefit to having a coherent and composable set of packages for users. The reconverse - a set of compatible packages with common APIs, data types, and standards - is our attempt to address this. Learn more about the reconverse here:
Code of conduct
In April, we updated the RECON code of conduct and began the search for an external individual to sit on Code of Conduct Committee who was independent of the Executive Board. We are pleased to announce that Marie Meudec, Senior Social Scientist in the Outbreak Research Team, Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp, has accepted our invitation to join the committee, alongside current board member Soledad Colombe and previous board member Claire Thomson.
Covid-19 challenge
We were awarded an R Consortium grant for $23,300 to develop the RECON COVID-19 challenge, a project aiming to centralise, organise and manage needs for analytics resources in R to support the global COVID-19 response. Through this grant we expanded our preliminary collection of github issues to create a user-friendly web platform gathering R tasks reflecting needs from different projects and groups, and facilitate contributions from the wider R programming community. Check it out here.
Stay in touch!
Join our mailing list and Slack to keep up to date with RECON activities and in touch with other RECON members
- To join our mailing list, please feel in this form
- To join our Slack forum: join reconhub.slack.com
Interested in joining RECON to participate in RECON activities or have a say in RECON priorities? Learn more and find an application form at https://www.repidemicsconsortium.org/join/.