R User Groups Update

by Joseph Rickert

After an end-of-year slow down in R user group acrtivity that lasted into mid January, the Revolution Analytics’ Community Calendar indicates that R user groups worldwide are back in full swing with 48 events listed in the short month of February. And, while the total number of active user groups has not grown from this time last year it is at least holding steady. A recent review of the Revolution Analytics R User Group Directory revealed that new user groups have formed over the last few months to offset those that appear to have gone inactive. Those of you who are familiar with the map we publish from time to time will see even more dots marking R users groups in far-flung places that were previously only white space. From Kansas City to Dakar and then onto Mumbai and Wellington people are meeting to talk about R.

Our latest count is 123 groups distributed across 41 countries. If we have missed a group, please let us know. User groups founded over the past year include those in the following table:

R User Group Name                       City    Approximate Start Date
R-omania Team                         Bucharest          4/4/2013
Grupo de Usarios de R Argentina       Buenos Ares        8/1/2013
Cairo Bioinformatics Group            Cairo             8/29/2013
DakaR R User Group (DRUG)             Dakar            10/23/2013
R User Group, Gainesville             Gainesville, FL   5/22/2013
Glasgow R Users Group and Modelling
Systems Community                     Glasgow            9/1/2013
Kansas City R Users Group             Kansas City, MO   12/2/2013
Knoxville R Users Group (KRUG)        Knoxville, TN     3/28/2013
RLyon                                 Lyon             12/19/2013
MumbaiR                               Mumbai            9/15/2013
Pune R User Group                     Pune              7/17/2013
SheffieldR                            Sheffield         3/28/2013
Wellington R Users Group (WRUG)       Wellington         9/5/2013

At Revolution Analytics we believe that user groups are essential to the growth and health of the R Community. While R Core keeps the wheels turning and the thousands of R package authors expand the capabilities of the language, the person-to-person interactions that take place in the R user groups generate the enthusiasm and vitality that fuels creativity. So far this year, Revolution Analytics has provided financial support to 30 user groups. Half of these have qualified at either the Matrix or Array levels! If you are the organizer of an R user group and you think support from Revolution might help you to grow your group, or expand the scope of what you can do, please submit an application for our 2014 user group program as soon as you can. We will be accepting Matrix and Array level applications through the end of March, just little more than a month away. (Check here to see if you qualify.) We will be accepting Vector level applications until September 20, 2014. So, if you are in an area where there is no R user group, there is still time to search out a few comrads in R, put up a meetup site and fill in some more white space. Good luck, and let us know how we can help.