Individual contributors will encompass the majority of our community and encapsulates those using and contributing to the development of any pharmaverse package. Examples of how you could get involved to help us achieve our vision:

• Use existing recommended packages and advocate usage within your organisation
• Raise feedback via Issues for areas where you find potential package enhancements or bugs
• For those packages with an open contribution model, develop new functionality and make pull requests to make your code available for re-use
• For new pharmaverse package collaborations, volunteer for user testing to help the development team build robust solutions

To help you find suitable open source packages to contribute your skills toward, check out openpharma.pharmaverse.org. Here you can see a range of open issues where people are asking for support via “good first issue” or “help wanted” GitHub issue labels. If you’d like to contribute to any, then open up the respective issue and add a comment so that the author or development team could help arrange any required access/onboarding to help you get started. Over time, you might even make the Leader Board!

It can feel daunting getting involved initially in open source, so we asked our community for tips and here’s what they shared:

• If you are new to R package development or Git/GitHub then there are freely available resources to help you learn like R Packages book, Git tutorial or GitHub interactive course
• Start small (e.g. a single package, single issue) and in an area you feel most comfortable with from your past experience. Taking on something small like updating a unit test program or some documentation can be a simpler way to build confidence versus jumping into building functions
• If you’d ever like to practice a dummy contribution, then the {admiral} package offers this issue - just add a comment there to express interest and you could get assigned repo write access to be able to try it out
• Finally and most importantly, please don’t be afraid that your code will be judged publicly! If you make a mistake it’s absolutely OK - most people do at the start, and that’s what Pull Request reviews are there for. The other developers on the package will help advise you

Remember, you don’t need to be an expert R package developer to contribute, you just need to be passionate and willing to share your time! We’re sure you’ll get a lot back from the experience.