Introduction to GitHub: Collaboration Basics for R Users Workshop

Friday June 26, 2026

9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Karl Miller Center, 615 SW Harrison Street, Portland, OR

Room KMC TBD

This beginner-friendly workshop introduces GitHub through hands-on, low-pressure collaboration rather than lectures about version control. Participants will contribute content to a shared “community cookbook,” open and review pull requests, and see their work appear on a live, published site. The session is designed to be fun, social, and practical—expect light chaos, friendly reviews, and a clear sense of how GitHub turns individual edits into shared outcomes. No command-line Git required.

Knowledge Prerequisites: Create a GitHub account at www.github.com and set up 2FA, if you have not already. No prior GitHub experience required. Familiarity with R or Markdown is helpful but not necessary.

Instructor

Skyler Elmstrom headshot

Skyler Elmstrom

Pronouns: He/him/his

Location: Everett, Washington

Skyler Elmstrom is a Public Health Data Science and Informatics Specialist at the Washington State Department of Health. His work focuses on modern, reproducible analytics workflows using GitHub, Quarto, R, Python, and cloud platforms. He regularly teaches GitHub and documentation workflows to analysts and researchers across public-sector and academic settings, with an emphasis on practical skills people can immediately reuse.