BRUG Meeting August 2026 Recap

meetings
brug
Author

Erwin Lares

Published

August 12, 2026

Modified

August 24, 2026

Details

  • Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2026
  • Time: 1:30 PM [end time not confirmed — carrying over the proposed 1:30–2:30 PM slot from last meeting; adjust if it ran differently]
  • Location: CS 3139, Computer Science Building, UW–Madison [carried over from the room already reserved after Meeting #1 — confirm this is where it actually happened]
  • Notes by: Jayden Merrick

Who was there

A smaller group this time — seven people, most of them returning from the soft opening, joined by a couple of new faces. A good sign that new people keep finding their way to BRUG even as the core group holds steady.

Show and Tell

This meeting doubled as a hands-on walkthrough of The Burrows: a demo of the new threaded discussion layer (giscus, backed by GitHub Discussions), followed by a live walkthrough of how to submit a pull request. Several attendees followed along and opened their own PRs on the spot — a genuinely nice moment, since a few of those were reviewed and merged into the site before the meeting even wrapped. Nothing settles nerves about contributing to a shared repo quite like watching your own change go live.

Decisions made

  • The pull request workflow works, in practice, not just in theory: several attendees submitted PRs during the meeting itself, and they were reviewed and merged on the spot.
  • A pull request description template for contributing to The Burrows has already been written. Whether it’s actually been posted anywhere visible is still an open question (see below).

Beyond that, this meeting was largely exploratory — most items below were raised as questions or suggestions rather than settled outright.

Open suggestions

Governance and infrastructure

  • Whether BRUG should register a dedicated website domain.
  • Whether to set up an organizational GitHub repository and/or a community-of-practice email address (e.g. brug@wisc.edu) — and whether university policy requires a specific university-affiliated repo for a group like BRUG, given considerations like patents and trademarks.
  • Whether the logo question is settled: stick with the RRR “Reproducible Cube,” or explore mascots beyond Bitsey the Badger.
  • Whether “Broader Community” and “Resources” are clear names for what each page actually contains, or whether they need rethinking.

Site content

  • Add a Badger BioData tag to the Resources page.
  • Add Datawonks to the Broader Community page — possibly already underway via a pull request.
  • Confirm whether the existing pull request description template has been posted anywhere members can find it.
  • Add a list of open source projects, aimed at Badger BioData members.
  • Add a pull request tutorial for Badger BioData members (an IBM guide was floated as a possible model).
  • Check whether CHTC has resources worth linking from the Broader Community page.

Outreach

  • Apply for a Lightning Talk slot at the Data Science Hub as a way to raise BRUG’s visibility on campus.

Connections & outreach

  • Badger BioData came up repeatedly as a natural collaborator — tagging them on Resources, building an open-source-projects list for their members, and adding a PR tutorial pitched at them.
  • Datawonks was to the Broader Community page, possibly via a pull request already in motion.
  • CHTC was floated as a possible source of additional resources for the Broader Community page.
  • The Data Science Hub’s Lightning Talks were suggested as a venue for propagating BRUG outward to a wider campus audience.

Next meeting

  • Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2026
  • Time: 1:30 – 2:30 PM
  • Location: CS 3139, Computer Science Building, UW–Madison
  • Planned focus: A hands-on session on toolero, walking through the functions it offers for getting a new R project started on the right foot. The rest of the brainstorm from this meeting — Git/GitHub fundamentals, reproducibility topics, and the wider tour of packages and tooling — stays on the list for future sessions.

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