Reduced Service Mode for R-Ladies Global

This year has been and continues to be a challenging year for many, if not all, of us.

We have needed to make some adjustments in our personal lives and as R-Ladies is a volunteer run organisation we also needed to make some changes in the work we do at R-Ladies Global.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, we have added new infrastructure for online meetups via Calendly, Zoom and a YouTube channel, along with guides and training for organizers. These new tools provide a bigger platform for all those great events that our incredible chapters put on despite all challenges. We’ve maintained a lot of our daily operations but had to leave some bigger items on the organisational to-do list while we deal with the many ways the pandemic is changing our lives.

As a result of the current global situation, R-Ladies Global is currently operating in a “reduced service mode.”

Continued but slowed down activities:

We continue to provide infrastructure for chapters to be supported in their day-to-day activities and continue to ensure funding for that infrastructure. In broad terms this means: The Meetup account and the Zoom room will be available. New organisers can still start their chapter and be onboarded with Meetup, E-Mail, GitHub, etc. The global Twitter account is running to amplify the chapter accounts. However, things likely will take longer than usual.

Paused activities:

In order to provide this, we have to largely pause work on a lot of initiatives we deeply care about. We won’t be making the progress we had hoped for this year on making the organisation more inclusive and more diverse and we won’t be able to comment on bigger events. This means for example that a discussion on a possible name change and rebranding as well as scholarships are pending. We are keeping these issues on our radar and will address them when we can.

Depending-on-capacity activities:

Most of our other initiatives may see some activity but it will largely be determined by whatever capacity we have at a given moment. This affects things like:

  • Mentoring program
  • Website and R-Ladies blog
  • R-Ladies Directory
  • Reviewer network
  • RoCur Twitter account (@WeAreRLadies)
  • Community Slack
  • Any changes in existing chapter infrastructure (email, GitHub, YouTube, Meetup, Slack Organizers, chapter’s social media)
  • Liaison with others orgs and conferences

We thank you for your understanding. We want to get through this together and return to making the R community a better, fairer, and more inclusive place, soon!