R Consortium: Supporting the R Community - Cleveland R User Group 20171026

Transcript

1. Supporting the R community John Mertic Director of Program Management Linux Foundation
2. R is seeing remarkable growth Source: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/10/10/impressive-growth-r/
3. But with growth, come challenges • ’The official documentation is written as though for people already R experts and is almost completely useless for beginners. It took me at least a couple of years to figure out how to read help pages!’ • ‘Why n number of packages are there to do same task? Decision tree is produced nicely by cutter command but still apart exists. We need to take out the not so good packages and retain the best in a newly launched list of packages.’ • ‘Not all packages are maintained in a consistent way, lack of backward compatibility, poor readability, and rather infrequent updates.’ • 'Working seriously on internationalization.’ • 'Supporting participation of underrepresented minorities in the community.’ • 'Helping to ensure that the development and improvement of R itself is sustainable in the future. I'm concerned that R Core members and CRAN volunteers are being asked to do too much work with no compensation, and that this is unsustainable.’ • 'Trying to align how packages work a bit more. Not to say a heavy hand should apply here. Maybe packages that meet certain standards get a certified sticker' Source: R Consortium Community Survey 2017
4. • Increased involvement from R users and R stakeholders would benefit everyone. • How can the R Community scale to address the needs of the next 2 million users?
5. Why R Consortium? • Identifying and funding critical gaps in the R Community is critical to long term sustainability. – Packages – User development – Awareness • As a vendor-neutral foundation, R Consortium is a steward for the good of the community.
6. Foundations enable ecosystems by creating trust Successful Projects depend on members, developers, infrastructure to develop technology, which is turned into products that the market will adopt. 6 Ecosystem
7. Infrastructure Projects
8. ISC Projects • Infrastructure • Education • Documentation • Production use of R • Package ecosystem • Grants fund developers • Funds allocated for 22 projects, totaling ~$460K
9. ISC Working Groups What they are: • Projects for exploring new technology • Forums for achieving consensus • The mechanism for organizing and executing large collaborative projects Benefits: • Sponsored by the R Consortium • Receive attention from the R Foundation • Visible to the greater R Community • Receive administrative support from the R Consortium
10. R-hub: R package building service • Services that ease all steps the R package development process. • Make these services free for all members of the community. • Allow community contributions to R-hub itself. • Make CRAN maintainers' work easier by pre-testing CRAN package submissions. • $85,000, Jan 2016 — Feb 2017
11. R Localization (RL10N): • Richie Cotton (Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar) and Thomas Leeper (The London School of Economics) • Majority of R packages in English only • RL10N project will make it easier for R developers to include translations in their own packages • Plan: – Improve msgtools package – New package to adapt MTurkR for managing translation – New package to adapt translateR for automated translations
12. Code Coverage Tool for R • Develop a tool for R that determines code coverage upon execution of a test suite • Improve software quality • Promoting the use of code coverage more systematically within the R ecosystem Working Group Members • Shivank Agrawal, Oracle • Chris Campbell, Mango Solutions • Santosh Chaudhari, Oracle • Karl Forner, Quartz Bio • Jim Hester, RStudio • Mark Hornick, Oracle – Group Leader • Chen Liang, Oracle • Willem Ligtenberg, Open Analytics • Andy Nicholls, Mango Solutions • Vlad Sharanhovich, Oracle • Tobias Verbeke, Open Analytics • Qin Wang, Oracle • Hadley Wickham, RStudio – ISC Sponsor Learn more at: https://wiki.r- consortium.org/view/Code_Coverage_Tool_for_R
13. Improving Database Interface (DBI): • Kirill Müller (ETH Zürich) • Improve database access in R so that porting code is simplified and less prone to error • Plan: – Create a DBI specification, centralized test and boiler plate for DBI backends – Improve existing DBI backends to adhere to the standard – Focus on RMySQL, RPostgres and RSQLite • https://github.com/rstats-db/DBItest
14. Community Projects
18. Recent work • Survey for the R User Community – Recently completed, results to be shared soon • 10 new projects recently funded and in progress – https://www.r-consortium.org/blog/2017/04/03/q1-2017-isc- grants • Fall round of funding in progress now. • Focus on how to better support R users – Industry events, package investment, certification program
19. How to get involved? Have your organization support R Consortium with membership https://www.r-consortium.org/about/join Visit R Consortium website https://www.r-consortium.org/ Learn about ISC funded and sponsored work https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/ Learn about the RUGS program https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/r-user-group-support-program
20. Questions?