In 2021, my colleague Aleksandra Wilczynska and I founded a community of practice called the TU Delft R Café. It is an inclusive and welcoming space for members to share knowledge and learn together about the programming language, R. We test our skills and hear from other volunteer presenters about the interesting things they are building using this free and open-source language.

Within the first year, the community became fully funded with a generous grant from the Open Science Community Delft and is now incorporated within the university Library and IT Departments. The group continuesto meet monthly around themes ranging from R for geospatial data to organizing a research paper as an R package, serving a growing community of 40+ members and building strong connections to similar initiatives at other Dutch universities.

In collaboration with organizers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Utrecht University, we created a funded initiative to assist other CAFE-style learning communities with organization, by collecting best practices and creating a CAFE Playbook. See more here.  

For more information, please see the dedicated website.