quarto::quarto_render()Get Involved
Get involved with NHS-R Community
We welcome contributions to our activities which range in experience of technical knowledge.
No coding necessary
Corrections, comments or suggestions
Commenting on Quarto books is possible through either logging in using Giscus which requires a GitHub account and details and pointers on setting up an account are in our slides for the Introduction to Git and GitHub using R or from Hypothes.is which can be seen as a pop out in the top right of every page of a book.
Comments and suggestions can be shared with NHS-R Community in Slack. Slack is also a great place to let others know about projects or events you want to promote or think are of interest.
We will also welcome comments through email at nhs.rcommunity@nhs.net.
Blogs
We’d love to receive blogs for the website and these can be emailed to nhs.rcommunity@nhs.net.
If you want to submit the blog as a Quarto document and directly to the repository we’d love to receive a pull request from you. If you are new to using Quarto or GitHub and need any help at all with this please do let us know as this can be a great first step into open coding.
Contributing to the website
Pre-work (tip)
Before the instructions on what to do to contribute make sure you have git installed on your computer and a GitHub account. Details on how to get set up can be found in the Introduction to Git and GitHub using R course.
The first step to contributing is to clone the site to your own GitHub account. As with many programs and coding there are numerous ways to do this but one nice way in R is to use the package {usethis}. Details on how to use the package to clone or fork (depending on your access rights) is detailed in the Introduction to Git and GitHub course materials.
From your own repository you should create a new branch. Again, using {usethis} you can follow the steps from the course https://intro-git-github.nhsrcommunity.com/session-usethis-gert.html#/start-new-work and then create a pull request.
PR to which repository? (tip)
By following these instructions you will have created a new branch in your repository so the PR (pull request) will go automatically to your own repository’s main branch. You can either complete this which updates your main or redirect the PR in GitHub to the original NHS-R Community repository which will be possible as the two are linked.
Blog submissions
If you are writing a blog and are submitting this through a Pull Request in GitHub, please save a .qmd file into the folder called blog and any images you’ve used in the img subfolder. Also ensure that all images used have suitable alternative text as good practice and this will need to be a short description of the image.
The format for the header part of the .qmd YAML template is often set out like this:
---
title: "Your title here"
date: "17 October 2022"
date-modified: "27 July 2024"
categories:
- Something
- Something Else
author: Your name
image: img/picture.jpg
image-alt: "Please add a short description"
subtitle: >
"Please add a short description of the blog if you'd like or remove this text"
---The default for all blogs’ YAML is:
execute:
`eval: true
echo: trueso is not necessary in the blogs themselves. However, if you wish to change the default so the blog, for example, shows code but does not run it then the YAML needs the following added to the individual blog .qmd YAML:
execute:
eval: falseMore details on the excution options are available from the Quarto documentation website.
Website creation
You only need to submit the .qmd file and any images as the repository will recreate the book online using GitHub Actions once the Pull Request has been accepted. However, you can still view the website locally to see if everything works by running the R code with the {quarto} package loaded:
Building the website localled (warning)
Viewing the blog locally can take time as it builds several pages for the website and will create other files like .html as well as update the site_libs folder files.
When submitting an Pull Request none of these newly generated files are required.
YouTube
We have nearly 200 videos on YouTube and although subtitles are automatically added by YouTube these require tidying so if you want to watch and correct text as you go along we’d welcome your help to improve the videos and make them more accessible.
We use Clipchamp which is a free video editing program provided by Microsoft.
Videos may also benefit from video chapters being added and notes on where to find resources that are referred to in the video. Sometimes people add these into the comments and that’s very welcome!
Podcasts
We have podcasts on Soundcloud and although these have been mostly hosted by Chris Beeley, can be hosted by anyone.
These are also being copied to YouTube so that subtitles can be added and, like the videos, often need corrections.
NHS-R Community Committee
The NHS-R Community Committee meets regularly and details of what the Committee do and how to get involved is in our NHS-Way book.
Coffee and Coding
We have a regular coffee and coding meeting where you can bring a question, some code you need help with or just come along to hear how about others’ work.
Practising coding
No matter where you are in your journey learning open source coding tools NHS-R Community welcomes contributions to the GitHub repostories where we have Quarto books, a website, R packages and training materials. This is an area for practising techniques as we don’t hold sensitive data.
Projects across our account use R, git, GitHub actions, Docker, R universe. No project is “finished” and improvements can always be suggested, Pull Requests made and direct access given (where appropriate and agreed).
Finding good first issues
GitHub has the facility to label or “tag” issues and this can help with searching for suitable open issues to work on or contribute to in the conversation. We use various labels on NHS-R GitHub repositories and to get started:
Tidying repositories
Standardisation of projects has started with READMEs with templates for text in the NHS-R Way and shared resources like logos kept in an asset repository.
Further tidying will be needed with licences, protection of main branches and recognising all contributors.
New projects
We have many repositories and ongoing projects but if you have a project you’d like to start or share with us we are happy to host these too. We just ask that anything that is passed to our repository is open under the MIT or CC0 licences and if you’ve used something else to just get in touch about it.
Teaching and sharing
NHS-R Community hosts very popular, free, workshops and webinars throughout the year.
All our materials are free to use, copy and change and we publish all our joining instructions.
Answer queries posted in help-with-r channel of the Slack