Our team has been cranking out a large number of tools over the past several months. As regular readers are aware, our software packages provide programmatic access to a diverse and extensive trove of scientific data. More recently we’ve expanded our efforts to build more general purpose and cross-domain tools. These include tools for reading, writing, integrating and publishing data, a unit testing platform for data, and a mapping engine that can visualize various kinds of spatial data. Many of our projects are inspired by ad hoc discussions with other scientists and software developers both online (often on Twitter and GitHub) and offline. Several of these folks are now regular contributors to the project. To foster more such collaborations and drive new software innovations, we are excited to announce our first developer meeting next month at GitHub’s headquarters in San Francisco. This meeting is made possible by support from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and GitHub.

In addition to the core development team, we have invited several key R developers and scientists to collaborate on projects in an unconference unhackathon format. The goal is to have participants (or anyone really) informally propose ideas on our meeting GitHub repo before and during the meeting and hack on ones that seem exciting. We hope to work on various projects related to open science, data visualization, data pipelines and text mining.

The event is invitation only due to funding and space limitations, but we would like to open up a handful of spots to anyone interested in joining us. We welcome inquiries from scholars, students, developers, data managers, and any interested amateurs. You don’t have to be an R expert as long as you’re open to learning and brainstorming on exciting projects and ideas. If this sounds interesting to you please send an informal email to info at ropensci.org with a little bit of about what you do and why you are keen on attending this event. We especially encourage women and minorities to apply. Financial assistance for travel to the event may be possible depending on availability of funds. If you require financial support, please mention that in your email.

We are quite looking forward to a fun and intellectually engaging meeting.

PS: We'll announce details on remote participation soon.