Start an event

Woohoo! You’re interested in running a satRday event near you. That’s super awesome, but of course you need to know what’s involved before you commit to an event.

What is a satRday?

A satRday is a low cost conference that focuses on R and the main event runs on a Saturday. The low-cost and weekend nature of the event means it is accessible to a broad range of people who would otherwise not be able to attend.

  • An R conference1
  • Happens on a Saturday
  • Has a low cost to attend2
  • Is inclusive

What else a satRday is, is up to you. You decide if you want extra workshop days, how many tracks to have, whether you have keynotes or not, and what the talk lengths and focus areas are. It’s up to you to make your satRday a success that you’re happy with!

How we help

We do try to make it easier on you than running your own event though. We offer some distinct advantages over going it alone:

  • A brand Coming up with and building an identity for your conference is pretty hard work and using an established brand helps you avoid that time sink
  • A support network The central team are all experienced conference organisers and we’re here to help, the other event organisers are also a peer group of folks going through the same thing as you making it great to get advice and ideas
  • An infrastructure We have site templates, sort the hosting, and nifty tools that you can use to get up and running, no reinventing the wheel required
  • An ethos We make learning about R accessible and local, our focus on getting R to the people instead of getting the people to R helps build a diverse and growing local community of R users

What’s involved

Firstly, running a satRdays event involves a lot of effort. Hopefully, we can reduce the effort versus building your own event entirely from scratch but we recommend gathering a team of nifty, proactive people to help you make your event happen.

You’ll need to plan and execute the satRday event including getting the funds for it. We always recommend you run as lean as possible, trying to get free venues3 and keeping costs to within the price you charge attendees.

Your job is to make an R event happen that lots of folks can attend and get value out of – it doesn’t have to be a swanky event! Cheap and cheerful is great.

Get started!

If we haven’t scared you off, then you need to join us on the #satrdays-chat channel of the R User Groups Slack workspace and reserve a spot on the events calendar.

Important Requirements

Here are the requirements that every event must adhere to:

  • The main event must happen on a Saturday
  • The event must operate under our Code of Conduct and have a strong commitment to increasing the diversity of speakers and attendees
  • The ticket price to attend the Saturday for an industry person must cost less than 8 hours of minimum wage work
  • You should have a pot of free tickets available for people who can’t afford the full cost
  • Speakers should not be required to pay the attendance fee
  • You should have a mechanism to encourage and mentor new speakers
  • The event should be volunteer run
  • Excess funds should support your local community whether that’s the user group, holding the funds over for your next satRday, or arranging a big name speaker to come do a workshop during the next year
  1. Other languages allowed too but it should be generally R oriented [return]
  2. Capped at a days wage at the local minimum wage (or equivalent) [return]
  3. Saturdays make it easy to get educational venues [return]