coRps

Project Purpose

Create an inclusive learning/sharing collaborative withing USAID’s Office of HIV/AIDS (OHA) where analysts could gain from others’ analytic experiences, primarily in and around R. The focus was on how improve skills collectively so we could develop and foster principles of conducting analysis and data viz.

Overview

• Bi-weekly meetings with up to 40 participants to share out on lessons learned, best pratices, and provide assistance through office hour type sessions
• Focused on a variety of analysis and visualization topics - basics of R, automation, workflows, mapping, package development, unit tests, git

Outcomes

• Create a learning space for R users of all levels
• Designed a 12 part R Building Blocks Series modeled after R for Data Science combined with PEPFAR data and our custom build R packages
• Developed a R Analyst User Guide to (a) layout standard pratices for analytic workflows and data storage/access and (b) assist in on-boarding new R users
• Fostered a data scientist/analyst community

Lessons Learned

• How to reach audiences of different skill levels
• How to create interative code-based sharing/learning sessions
• Improvement in documentation about standard practices