Soft opening recap

meetup
brug
recap
A recap of BRUG’s soft opening — turnout, decisions made, and what’s coming next.
Author

Erwin Lares

Published

July 9, 2026

Modified

July 17, 2026

*Originally announced here

Details

  • Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2026
  • Time: 1:00 – 2:30 PM
  • Location: CS 3139, Computer Science Building, UW–Madison
  • Notes by: Jayden Merrick

Who was there

A genuinely mixed crowd of about ten — researchers, faculty, staff researchers, data analysts, grad students, and undergrads, all trading resources and ideas in the same room. Several attendees mentioned they’d bring PIs and colleagues along to future meetings.

Show and Tell

John La Plante from Posit introduced Positron and Posit’s enterprise products.

Decisions made

  • Meetings will happen monthly going forward.
  • The next meeting will focus on learning about our website — The Burrows — how to carry out a pull request to collaborate, share resources, and share content in general.

Open suggestions

  • Post directions to the meeting room for people unfamiliar with the building.
  • Consider a GitLab wiki for troubleshooting/resources, linked from The Burrows. (Followed up: BRUG is staying with GitHub Discussions for now — see the Discussions page for the reasoning.)
  • Whether to add Slack, expand the Google Group, or use social media — including a possible joint Badger BioData/BRUG account to reach undergrads separately from post-graduate members.
  • Collaborate with other UW–Madison communities of practice (Data Wonks, Data Science Hub Code Meeting, and others).

Connections & outreach

  • Badger BioData, an undergraduate R/data club, is actively building its own Quarto site modeled on The Burrows.
  • The Badger Data Network reached out shortly after the soft opening asking to be added to the site — an early sign of the Wisconsin Idea’s “propagate outward” part working as intended.

Next meeting

  • Date: Pending vote — poll sent for Tuesday, August 4
  • Time: 1:30 – 2:30 PM (proposed recurring slot: first Tuesday of the month)
  • Location: Same room, already reserved
  • Planned focus: Package-focused workshop; also a good chance to walk everyone through using the website

Full internal notes and the attendee roster are kept separately and are not published here.