Community Call: Open Communities in the age of AI

[stefaniebutland]

Panel discussion with rOpensci, earthaccess, Sean Kross, Eli Holmes, others...

Great idea from @ateucher following ESA Champions Call 4 discussion from Open Communities breakout rooms and "the demise of Stackoverflow". See Call 4 debrief notes in Openscapes-CohortPlanningDoc [ 2026-esa ].

Notes:

• online coding communities give the impression of being more welcoming / ubiquitous than specific scientific communities
• use of agents and impact on communities
• AI feels “safe” because you can ask the dumb questions
• AI is not good at helping with design/architecture of software code. Experts need to provide this review
• AI is too obsequious, won’t necessarily give you constructive feedback on design decisions etc.
• what was rOpenSci's hook? Yes good practices, but not only the R coding itself. The hook was the human: “who wouldn’t want an expert you admire giving you feedback on your code?”

Anil Dash on What do coders do after AI?

The actual work of writing the code is abstracted away, with the creator essentially focused more on describing the desired end results, and making sure to test that everything is working correctly. You're more the conductor of the symphony than someone who's holding a violin. You're more the conductor of the symphony than someone who's holding a violin.

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Template outline to add updates as we plan.

Date:
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 am Pacific Time
Location: Zoom, (via zoom registration)

Agenda

Example times (PT)

• 9:45 - sign into Zoom to setup/check audio etc
• 9:55 - start rotating slides and letting people in Zoom
  • one slide says we'll start at at :02 after, say hello in Chat
• 10:00 - start pump up music, slides keep rotating
• 10:02 - welcome
• 10:05 - Celebrity interview or other speaker content
• 10:30 - Audience Q & A
• 10:50 - closing & thank you
• 10:55 - end

Examples of previous Openscapes Community Calls: https://openscapes.org/blog#category=community-call

TODO

In the checklist below, DATE is placeholder for deadline, to be filled in.

• set up zoom registration; add zoom link to Google Invites & Doc
• create page at https://openscapes.org/events
• create draft Google Doc for event
• promo announcement via Slacks, Mastodon, Bluesky
• engage potential participants / stakeholders
• planning meeting with speakers, Stef, Julie, 1-week prior to event
• Reminders
  • Slack, Mastodon, Bluesky
  • Zoom reminder email to registrants (since they each have unique zoom link; easily lost in earlier email)
• ask speakers about their favorite pump-up song/a song that we'll play at the intro
• create intro slides
• call takes place
• update Event page - event past
• publish blog post & promote
• add post link to Event page

[ateucher]

Really good article by Mara Averick: https://blog.stdlib.io/ai-and-the-invisible-newcomer-in-open-source/, good food for thought

edited to tag @batpigandme ❤️

[stefaniebutland]

@ateucher noted Running a polyglot data science community (Melissa Van Bussel, StatCan) | posit::conf(2025) (recording w transcript)

[stefaniebutland]

H/T @joelnitta

Interesting post about increase in CRAN submissions paralleling the (presumably AI-driven) overall increase in new apps: https://rworks.dev/posts/too-many-R-packages

post by @joseph-rickert

and branched discussion of Characteristics of good R Packages #68) with very very rich data & analyses by @mpadge who maintains a full database of over 90 individual statistics on every CRAN package ever, updated daily. Mark giving a talk on his analyses at useR!2026 Warsaw.

[stefaniebutland]

This discussion will influence our Open Communities Champions lesson

[yabellini]

This is a great topic!