Feb 04

RC RUGS 2019 Is Up and Running

By josephrickert Announcement, Blog, Uncategorized

The R Consortium’s 2019 R User Group and Small Conference Support program which provides cash grants to R focused user groups, and small R-themed conferences is now accepting applications for financial support.

R User Groups

Grants to R user groups are awarded in three categories that depend on the number of users who typically attend meetings, and the frequency with which the group meets.

Array Level: Large, established R user groups that held at least three meetings in the six month period prior to applying that attracted more than 100 attendees may be eligible for $1,000 grants.

Matrix Level: R user groups that held at least three meetings in the six month period prior to applying that attracted at least 50 attendees may be eligible for $500 grants.

Vector Level: Other groups, even very small ones just getting started, may be eligible for $150 grants.

In addition to the cash grants, R user groups accepted into the program are eligible to participate in the R Consortium’s meetup.com Pro program. Under this program, the R Consortium will pay a user group’s meetup.com dues for twelve months.

Small Conferences

Small conferences, typically those that expect to attract less than 200 people may apply for cash grants up to $1,000. To qualify, a conference must be either entirely devoted to the R language or applications using R, or have a significant amount of R content. To apply, conferences should have a public-facing web page with a code of conduct, information about the technical program and sponsorship information. Conferences will be evaluated, and grants awarded on a case-by-case basis.

Details for RUGS, meetup.com Pro and Small Conference programs may be found here on the R Consortium website. To apply for support, please use the online form.

Nov 02

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R-users & Community: give us your feedback on a R Certification to teach & verify skilled R Professionals

By John Mertic Announcement, Blog

In the past few years, we have seen an increase in the demand for R – both from employers looking for skilled R-users and professionals looking to further improve their skills. Due to this supply and demand gap, there have been various teaching channels created in an attempt to extend knowledge of the language. Even with the abundance of R teaching material, we still face a dearth of qualified, skilled R users. The inability to differentiate self-taught data scientists from qualified personnel creates confusion for employers and difficulties for quality professionals to separate themselves from the rest.

R Consortium started a working group that has identified an absence of a system to certify qualified R professionals as a cause for this problem. As a response to this, the group is working to create a certification for R that will allow professionals and students to acquire fundamental skills and knowledge of the language. Creation of this certification also aims to help recruiters identify and assess the skills of potential recruits. This group will be driven by the needs of the current R professionals and data science recruiters. More information about this initiative can be found here.

In order for this working group to create a valuable certification, we encourage community feedback in this initiative. Your feedback will help the working group to evolve this certification to best serve the needs of the R community. Please respond to this survey to help in the creation of this certification.

Sep 25

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Fall 2018: ISC Call for Proposals

By josephrickert Announcement, Blog

by Joseph Rickert

The second and final ISC Call for Proposals for 2018 is now open. We are looking for ambitious projects that will contribute to the infrastructure of the R ecosystem and benefit large sections of the R community. We are deliberately being a little vague here, but having awarded more than $650,000 in grants so far, we can show a substantial number of funded projects that provide examples.

If you are going to submit a proposal, “Think Big” but structure your proposal with intermediate milestones. The ISC is not likely to fund proposals that ask for large initial cash grants. We tend to be conservative with initial grants, preferring projects structured in such a way that significant initial milestones can be achieved with modest amounts of cash.

As with any proposed project, the more detailed and credible the project plan, and the better the track record of the project team, the higher the likelihood of receiving funding. Please be sure that your proposal includes measurable objectives, intermediate milestones, a list of all team members who will contributing work and a detailed accounting of how the grant money will be spent.

Also, if you think you are onto something but could use some help in finalizing scope of a project, or you think implementing your idea would require achieving some level of consensus within the R Community, you might consider asking the ISC to help you establish a working group.

If you don’t think you have an idea that is fundable but want to get involved, you might want to explore getting involved with existing projects or put some thought into one of the perennial issues associated with finding one’s way through the R ecosystem. For example, could you build a package discovery system or recommender engine that spans CRAN, Bioconductor and GitHub, or implement and curate a calendar that automatically tracks R related events worldwide?

Our goal in calling for proposals is to stimulate creativity and help turn good ideas into tangible benefits for the R Community. What can you do to improve the R ecosystem and how can the R Consortium help you do it?

Note that proposals to sponsor conferences, workshops or meetups should be sent directly to the R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program. These are not funded as ISC proposals. Note that the deadline for applying for support under the 2018 program is coming up quickly. Requests for support under the 2018 program must be received by midnight, September 30, 2018. The 2019 program will launch sometime in January.

To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form. You should receive confirmation within 24 hours.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is midnight PST, Sunday October 31, 2018.

Jun 07

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On conduct and diversity in the R Community

By John Mertic Announcement, Blog, Events, News, R Consortium Project

An explicit goal of the R Consortium is to help create a welcoming space for everyone, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, socio-economic status, nationality, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, ability, or age. Diversity and inclusion are essential to foster true collaboration, move ideas forward, and create long-term sustainable community.

R Consortium recently sponsored R/Finance 2018, where it was found that there were insufficient diversity and inclusion practices, including the absence of a prominently displayed Code of Conduct. This illuminated shortcomings with our existing processes for sponsoring conferences. We are troubled and disappointed to have sponsored a conference that does not reflect our core beliefs in diversity and inclusion.

The Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) has approved the creation of a new working group to address diversity and inclusion issues in the R community. The R Community Diversity and Inclusion Working Group (RCDI-WG), which will include members from R Community groups that promote diversity, such as R-Ladies and FORWARDS, event organizers, and key industry members, will focus on three areas:

Work with conferences organizers to ensure diversity is addressed as a priority in both their program committees and speaker lineups.
Establish recommended Code of Conduct and Diversity Guidelines for R Community events, which will be adopted by the R Consortium and required for any event that the R Consortium participates in.
Have an ongoing conversation on opportunities to drive diversity and inclusion across the R Community.

This group is open to any member of the R community, and you can join by signing up for the mailing list. The group plans to have a kickoff meeting soon to work on the Code of Conduct and Diversity Guidelines, with the goal to have them established later in summer 2018. Look for updates on progress on the R Consortium blog.

May 29

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Announcing the R Consortium ISC Funded Project grant recipients for Spring 2018

By John Mertic Announcement, Blog, News

The R Consortium supports the R Community through investments in sustainable infrastructure, community programs and collaborative projects. Through the The Funded Project Program, now in it’s fourth year, the R Consortium has invested more that $650,000 USD in over 30 projects that impact the over 2 million R users worldwide.

We are pleased to announce the Spring 2018 grant recipients. We will provide updates on these projects throughout the year. Congratulations to all grant recipients, and look forward to our session at useR!2018 this July where many of our funded projects will showcase their work and tips for leveraging the grant program for driving open collaboration.

Maintaining DBI

Grantee: Kirill Müller

DBI, R’s database interface, is a set of methods declared in the DBI R package. Communication with the database is implemented by DBI backends, packages that import DBI and implement its methods. A common interface is helpful for both users and backend implementers.

The Maintaining DBI Project which follows up on two previous projects supported by the R Consortium will provide ongoing maintenance and support for DBI, the DBItest test suite, and the three backends to open-source databases (RSQLite, RMariaDB and RPostgres).

Ongoing infrastructural development for R on Windows and MacOS

Grantee: Jeroen Ooms

The majority of R users rely on precompiled installers and binary packages for Windows and MacOS that are made available through CRAN. This project seeks to improve and maintain tools for providing such binaries. On Windows we will upgrade the Rtools compiler toolchain, and provide up-to-date Windows builds for the many external C/C++ libraries used by CRAN packages. For MacOS we will expand the R-Hub homebrew-cran with formulas that are needed by CRAN packages but not available from upstream homebrew-core. Eventually, we want to lay the foundation for a reproducible build system that is low maintenance, automated as much as possible, and which could be used by CRAN and other R package repositories.

Developing Tools and Templates for Teaching Materials

Grantee: François Michonneau

The first-class implementation of literate programming in R is one of the reasons for its success. While the seamless integration of code and text made possible by Sweave , knitr, and R Markdown was designed for writing reproducible reports and documentation, it has also enabled the creation of teaching materials that combine text, code examples, exercises and solutions. However, while people creating lessons in R Markdown are familiar with R, they often do not have a background in education or UX design. Therefore, they must not only assemble curriculum, but also find a way to present the content effectively and accessibly to both learners and instructors. As the model of open source development is being adapted to the creation of open educational resources, the difficulty to share materials due to a lack of consistency in their construction hinders the collaborative development of these resources.

This project will develop an R package that will facilitate the development of consistent teaching resources. It will encourage the use of tools and lesson structure that support and improve learning. By providing the technical framework for developing quality teaching materials, we seek to encourage collaborative lesson development by letting authors focus on the content rather than the formatting, while providing a more consistent experience for the learners.

PSI application for collaboration to create online R package validation repository

Grantee: Lyn Taylor (on behalf of PSI AIMS SIG)

The documentation available for R packages currently widely varies. The Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry (PSI) Application and Implementation of Methodologies in Statistics (AIMS) Special Interest Group (SIG) will collaborate with the R-Consortium and representatives from pharmaceutical companies on the setting up of an online repository /web portal, where validation which is of regulatory standard for R packages can be submitted and stored for free use. Companies (or individual R users) would still be liable to make their own assessment on whether the validation is suitable for their own use, however the online repository would serve as a portal for sharing existing regulatory standard validation documentation.

A unified platform for missing values methods and workflows

Grantees: Julie Josse and Nicholas Tierney

The objective is to create a reference platform on the theme of missing data management and to federate contributors. This platform will be the occasion to list the existing packages, the available literature as well as the tutorials that allow to analyze data with missing data. New work on the subject can be easily integrated and we will create examples of analysis workflows with missing data. Anyone who would like to contribute to this exciting project can contact us.

histoRicalg — Preserving and Transfering Algorithmic Knowledge

Grantee: John C Nash

Many of the algorithms making up the numerical building-blocks of R were developed several decades ago, particularly in Fortran. Some were translated into C for use by R. Only a modest proportion of R users today are fluent in these languages, and many original authors are no longer active. Yet some of these codes may have bugs or need adjustment for new system capabilities. The histoRicalg project aims to document and test such codes that are still part of R, possibly creating all-R reference codes, hopefully by teaming older and younger workers so knowledge can be shared for the future. Our initial task is to establish a Working Group on Algorithms Used in R and add material to a website/wiki.

Interested workers are invited to contact John Nash.

Proposal to Create an R Consortium Working Group Focused on US Census Data

Grantee: Ari Lamstein

The Proposal to Create an R Consortium Working Group Focused on US Census Data aims to make life easier for R programmers who work with data from the US Census Bureau. It will create a working group where R users working with census data can cooperate under the guidance of the Census Bureau. Additionally, it will publish a guide to working with Census data in R that aims to help R programmers a) select packages that meet their needs and b) navigate the various data sets that the Census Bureau publishes.

Apr 19

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Wanted: Your input on the next generation of R-Hub

By josephrickert Announcement, Blog, R Consortium Project

R-Hub, which was originally conceived as a useful tool for R package developers to build and test R packages on a variety of platforms, was the first project funded by the R Consortium. The initial version was released in June 2016. Now that the capabilities of R-Hub have progressed well beyond the proof of concept stage, the R Consortium is looking for ideas from the R community on how we can make it and even more useful for R users.

We would like to know how you think we could improve existing functionality and what new features you would like to see. So far, we have come up with the following list of future goals for R-Hub. We welcome comments and suggestions:

Enable organizations to deploy repositories and build infrastructure locally for use in controlled corporate environments.
Provide a system to manage source code, builds, and binary packages in a repository that offers confidence and trust to R users.
Enable end-users to use packages with confidence by providing tools to assess code pedigree, license, quality, security, and package maintenance for individual packages.
Encourage and enable package developers to provide metadata for their packages to help end users discover packages.
Provide package authors and maintainers a broad testing matrix that works on multiple architectures, operating systems, and R runtime engines.
Provide package developers with feedback required to assess and ensure broad compatibility for their packages.

We would very much appreciate comments on this vision for future development along with your assessment of the current system, including your answers to such questions as:

What value does R Hub provide you today?
What does R Hub not do well?
What other aspects of package development should R Hub add?
How could R Hub best serve the corporate package development, deployment, and management process?
Is there anything that CRAN isn’t providing that you would like to have?

Please send your comments to the following email address: isc@r-consortium.com

Note that you may try R-Hub here.

Mar 27

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R Consortium welcomes R-Ladies as a top level project

By John Mertic Announcement, Blog, News, R Consortium Project

In 2016, R-Ladies started their effort for a global expansion, with the help from the R-Consortium. Back then there were only 4 active chapters (San Francisco, Taipei, Twin Cities and London) and the goal was to expand to 5-10 cities within the next year. The enthusiasm within the R community for local R-Ladies chapters far exceeded any possible expectations! As of March 2018, the organization has over 90 chapters and almost 19,000 members.

There are R-Ladies chapters in 45 countries around the globe, with many chapters hosting monthly events.

With this fast growth, it became apparent to the R Consortium ISC that this project needs long term investment for success. The diversified voice of R-Ladies, speaking not only as a group representing gender minorities in tech but also a group attracting new R users, aligned with the R Consortium’s defined Code of Conduct and its desires for building a more diverse and inclusive R community.

R Consortium ISC is pleased to announce and welcome R-Ladies as a top level project. R-Ladies has shown a big commitment within the R community and becoming a top level project will provide them a longer term budget cycle (3 years instead of 1 year) to support their community. R-Ladies will also have a voting seat on the ISC (represented by Gabriela de Queiroz).

We invite all in the R community to congratulate R-Ladies on this milestone, and look forward to ensuring they have the infrastructure and funding to bring more diversity to the R community.

Feb 22

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Announcing the second round of ISC Funded Projects for 2017

By John Mertic Announcement, Blog, News, R Consortium Project

The R Consortium ISC is pleased to announce that the projects listed below were funded under the 2017 edition of the ISC Funded Projects program. This program, which provides financial support for projects that enhance the infrastructure of the R ecosystem or which benefit large segments of the R Community, has awarded $500,000 USD in grants to date. The Spring 2018 call for proposals is now open and will continue to accept proposals until midnight PST on April 1, 2018. Learn more about the program and how to apply for funding for your project.

Quantities for R

Proposed by Iñaki Ucar

The ‘units’ package has become the reference for quantity calculus in R, with a wide and welcoming response from the R community. Along the same lines, the ‘errors’ package integrates and automatises error propagation and printing for R vectors. A significant fraction of R users, both practitioners and researchers, use R to analyse measurements, and would benefit from a joint processing of quantity values with errors.

This project not only aims at orchestrating units and errors in a new data type, but will also extend the existing frameworks (compatibility with base R as well as other frameworks such as the tidyverse) and standardise how to import/export data with units and errors.

Refactoring and updating the SWIG R module

Proposed by Richard Beare

The Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG) is a tool for automatically generating interface code between interpreters, including R, and a C or C++ library. The R module needs to be updated to support modern developments in R and the rest of SWIG. This project aims to make the R module conform to the recommended SWIG standards and thus ensure that there is support for R in the future. We hope that this project will be the first step in allowing SWIG generated R code using reference classes.

Future Minimal API: Specification with Backend Conformance Test Suite

Proposed by Henrik Bengtsson

The objective of the Future Framework implemented in the future package is to simplify how parallel and distributed processing is conducted in R. This project aims to provide a formal Future API specification and provide a test framework for validating the conformance of existing (e.g. future.batchtools and future.callr) and to-come third-party parallel backends to the Future framework.

An Earth data processing backend for testing and evaluating stars

Proposed by Edzer Pebesma

The stars project enables the processing Earth imagery data that is held on servers, without the need to download it to local hard drive. This project will (i) create software to run a back-end, (ii) develop scripts and tutorials that explain how such a data server and processing backend can be set up, and (iii) create an instance of such a backend in the AWS cloud that can be used for testing and evaluation purposes.

Jan 31

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R Consortium Call For Proposals: February 2018

By josephrickert Announcement, Blog, News, R Consortium Project

by Joseph Rickert

The first ISC Call for Proposals for 2018 is now open. We are looking for ambitious projects that will contribute to the infrastructure of the R ecosystem and benefit large sections of the R community. However, we are not likely to fund proposals that ask for large initial cash grants. The ISC tends to be conservative with initial grants, preferring projects structured in such a way that significant initial milestones can be achieved with modest amounts of cash.

But, most importantly – don’t let this talk of large projects dampen your enthusiasm! We are looking for projects with impact, regardless of their size. With this call for proposals, we are hoping to stimulate creativity and help turn good ideas into tangible benefits. Look around your corner of the R Community, what needs doing and how can the R Consortium help?

Please do not submit proposals to sponsor conferences, workshops or meetups. These requests should be sent directly to the R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program.

To submit a proposal for ISC funding, read the Call for Proposals page and submit a self-contained pdf using the online form. You should receive confirmation within 24 hours.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is midnight PST, Sunday April 1, 2018.

Jan 31

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The 2018 R Consortium R User Group Support Program is Underway.

By josephrickert Announcement, Blog, Events, News, R Consortium Project

In just one year, the R Consortium through the R User Group Support program sponsored 76 R user groups and 3 small conferences with cash grants totaling just under $30,000. This program aligns with the R Consortium mission of fostering the continued growth of R community and the data science ecosystem, and has already helped bring more people to using R and contributing to the community.

Coming off a successful 2017, we are pleased to announce the opening of the 2018 program today. While the structure of the 2018 program is similar to last year’s program with the multiple levels of support, we have enhanced the program based on feedback from last year’s funded user groups.

Complimentary Meetup.com Pro Account

After a year of supporting user groups, we’ve found that the primary cost for each group is having a page on meetup.com or thier own website ( though the majority prefer the meetup.com platform ). This leaves less funds available things like meetup space, food, or even swag, and thus put more of a burden on the group leaders to attract people to the group.

This year we’ve leveraged our relationship with the Linux Foundation, and now will provide each user group a complimentary meetup.com Pro account. Leveraging this not removes one less cost concern for group leaders, but it will also better enable us to promote user groups through the many features the platform provides for groups. For all the details of the program, eligibility requirements for the three levels of user group grants, the schedule of grants and the details of signing up for the meetup.com pro account please see the R Consortium’s R User Group Support Program webpage.

Small Conference Support

We’ve also seen an increase in the number of smaller, regional focused R conferences happening around the world. Grassroots events like this are critical for sustainability in the R community, but need financial support and community awareness to be successful. Several reached out last year and we provided funding with excess funds in the program with great results.

These events perfectly align with the mission of the R User Group Support program, we’re formally expanding it this year to provide cash grants in the $500 to $1,000 range to continue to encourage small, R-focused conferences and meetings organized by non-profit or volunteer groups are the world. You can find out more about this new piece of the program on the R Consortium’s R User Group Support Program webpage.

Length of Program

R Consortium will begin taking applications for both R User Group Support and Small Conference Support today. Applications will be accepted through September 30, 2018.

Apply to the 2018 RC RUGS program by filling out this form. You can email us at rugs@r-consortium.org with any questions around the program.