Automating community management tasks

[yabellini]

Automating community management tasks

Who is the audience?

Communities and projects that want ideas and examples of what community management tasks can be automated and how much.

Why is this important?

• Perform tasks more efficiently and with fewer errors.
• Use people's time to add value to the community management content and program.
• Generate standards and workflows that can be used in other projects.

What should be covered?

• 2 or 3 projects or communities that show what kind of automation they have, what works, what not, and what tools they use.

Suggested speakers or contributors

• @steffilazerte
• @jonthegeek
• Who would you like to hear from?

Resources you would recommend to the audience

• Scheduling Mastodon Posts in R with rtoot and GitHub Actions - https://ropensci.org/blog/2023/05/17/scheduling-mastodon/

[Bisaloo]

I also know of some automation related to package releases and release announcement:

• we have automated blog posts in Epiverse-TRACE such as https://epiverse-trace.github.io/posts/epiparameter_v0.2.0/. It's controlled by a GitHub Actions workflow which will detect new releases and create a PR with the quarto file generated by create_release_post.R, which itself fills blanks in a template release.qmd post.
• on a similar note, the Posit teams automate a portion of their release posts with usethis::use_tidy_thanks() to automatically generate a list of contributors to the latest release.

[maelle]

Other resource: How We Curate Our Monthly Newsletter https://ropensci.org/blog/2021/06/24/news-meta/ 😸

[jonthegeek]

I do lots of automations for DSLC.io! Some of it probably doesn't save a ton of time, but I like to not have to think about it, so it's still worthwhile. Here are the examples that come to mind:

• TidyTuesday social media posting (Mastodon, LinkedIn, and DSLC Slack, plus reposting on Mastodon and LinkedIn)
• Assigning TidyTuesday submissions to weeks (this one is relatively new and we're still working out the kinks, but I tried to separate "curating a dataset" from "getting all the fiddly bits right for posts"; I really want to restructure that repo one of these days, but this at least helps us avoid some of the tedium)
• Processing book club meetings (I haven't fully sorted out persistent, non-interactive authentication for some of this, so it runs as a scheduled task on my machine; it downloads meeting videos + chat logs from Zoom, edits the video using "start" and "end" messages I've trained the clubs to put into the chat, and then uploads the videos to YouTube and posts the chat logs on DSLC Slack; one of these days I'll finish updating it to grab descriptions and titles from the Google Sheets for each meeting, both for YouTube and to post to Mastodon and LinkedIn, but for now I still have to do some manual steps to finalize things).
• Speaking of posting the meeting videos, that's almost automated. I copy/paste from Google Sheets for each club into a function that sorts out the text to add at the beginning and end, and grabs random videos from the archive to fill out the post up to the Mastodon limit. YouTube ads on these videos are currently 100% of our funding, so it'd be great to improve this system, perhaps grabbing high-value videos to promote in the "from the archive" videos.
• Slack reminders: I set up Slack reminders to auto-post the Zoom info to the appropriate book club channel 10 minutes before the meeting every week.

Talking about these things would be good, particularly if I could get help (and convince myself to let people run with things).

[Bisaloo]

@EllaKaye also automated the pairing for the rainbowR buddy scheme: https://rainbowr.org/posts/2023-11-16_introducing-buddies/

[yabellini]

Great ideas, resources, and people! @acrall will be an excellent moderator of this call 😉. We are organizing next year's comm calls. I will get in touch with you all to move forward with this topic 🙏

[acrall]

@yabellini I would love to serve as a moderator for this, thanks for thinking of me 🙂. It definitely aligns with my areas of interest. I also want to share this resource recently published on how The Turing Way uses bots in GitHub to automate community tasks.

[yabellini]

Thank you all for these great examples. 🙏 This comm call will be for next year. I will get in contact with you to start organizing it. 🙂