Everett Toews, Developer Advocate at Rackspace Hosting, will share his experience using Git and Markdown to make it easier for the community to propose changes to their documentation. Please arrive by 6pm. I want to start sort of promptly, by 6:05. (I'll be there by 5:30.) The building entry doors will be locked at 7pm. I'll appreciate help cleaning up, so we can depart by 8:30.

A common complaint against many open source projects is documentation. Insufficient, incorrect, non-existent, hard to find, and difficult to update are things we typically all hear. There are a lot of different ways to tackle these problems. There's no silver bullet but one of my favorite tactics is lowering the barriers for absolutely anyone to contribute documentation.

Ideally, lowering the barriers means:

• using a common and well understood documentation markup language

• using documentation editors that are commonly available

• not requiring your contributors to install and configure tools

• providing a preview of the updates to make reviews reviews easier

Learn how Apache jclouds has enabled walkup contributions to our project documentation. We've benefited from better documentation, shorter review times, and building community through contribution.

Speaker: Chester Ismay (https://github.com/ismayc) - Instructional Technologist/Statistical Consultant at Reed College

Abstract: One of the great recent additions from RStudio is the ability to create templates in R Markdown that allows R users to customize output to a variety of document formats while only needing to write in Markdown. You can create templates for outputting Word documents, HTML documents, and PDF documents all including R code and its output. I’ll discuss how to go about creating templates, demonstrate an R Markdown senior thesis template I created for Reed College seniors that interfaces with the traditional LaTeX thesis template, and hopefully provide you with an opportunity to write a template of your own during this meeting.