The R Consortium Gears Up For Business
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by Joseph Rickert
This week, the Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) of the R Consortium unanimously elected Hadley Wickham as its chair thereby also giving Hadley a seat on the R Consortium board of directors. Congratulations Hadley!!
This is a major step forward towards putting the R Consortium in business. Not only is the ISC the group that will decide on what projects the R Consortium will undertake, but it will also be responsible for actually getting the work done. (Look here for the charter of the ISC. )
The whole process of funding, soliciting, selecting and executing projects will work something like this: The board of directors under the leadership of its chair, Richard Pugh of Mango Solutions, will establish a budget for projects. The ISC will solicit proposals for new projects both from R Consortium member companies and from the R Community at large. With approval from the board, the ISC will decide which projects to fund. From there on, the ISC will assemble resources and manage the work. That’s the plan. The devil, of course, is in the details. There is much work to be done to put all of the necessary infrastructure in place, but Hadley’s election makes it possible for the ISC to begin bootstrapping the process.
So, while there is currently no formal proposal process in place, and the ISC and the R Consortium are not ready to begin the process of soliciting proposals from the public, it is not too early for the R Community to begin thinking about what work needs to be done. Now, is the time to begin thinking on a grand scale; well, at least on a scale that might be a bit more ambitious than creating a single R package.
What type of project might make the cut? I don’t want to set up any constraints here, or limit possibilities. But, just to pick one application area, it seems to me that that there were more than a few ideas kicked around in the HP Workshop on Distributed Computing in R held earlier this year that could be formulated into exciting and important projects. How about a unified interface for distributed computing in R?
If you have an idea for a project that you think would benefit the general R community but is more complicated than writing a simple package please start thinking about how you would write up your ideas, elaborating on the benefits to the R Community, technical feasibility, required resources etc. And, stayed tuned to R Consortium Announcements for information on when the proposal process will begin.
I’ll finish here by congratulating Hadley one more time, and state that I am very pleased to have the opportunity to work with him and the other members of the committee. I expect that with Hadley’s technical leadership, the guidance of the board of directors, and the participation of committed R users that the R Consortium will become an effective advocate and source of support for the R Community.
You can write to the ISC at: [email protected]
Some facts about the R Consortium
Founded: June 19, 2015
Status: The R Consortium is organized as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
Member organizations: Alteryx, Google, Hewlett Packard, Ketchum Trading, Mango Solutions, Microsoft, The R foundation, RStudio and Tibco
Board of Directors: David Smith (Microsoft), Hadley Wickham (RStudio), John Chambers (R Foundation), J.J. Allaire (RStudio), Louis Bajuk-Yorgan (Tibco) and Chair, Richard Pugh (Mango Solutions)
ISC Members: Hadley Wickham (RStudio), Joseph Rickert (Microsoft), Luke Tierney (R Foundation) and Stephen Kaluzny (Tibco)
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