Why Submitting Ideas To The R Consortium Is A Good Idea

By Steph Locke

Announced in June 2015, the R Consortium aims to support the R ecosystem and community and help grow the adoption of R. To deliver on these aims, the R Consortium has an Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC). The ISC are responsible for directing technical focus and overseeing projects to deliver improvements.

You’ll note in all this, that there’s no mention of a central vision for R beyond supporting it. That’s because the R Consortium is looking to support the projects that the community thinks will help it grow and thrive.

Every six months, the R Consortium will grant awards to proposals for projects that they feel best help the community. The ISC are responsible for receiving, evaluating, and selecting projects.

The first proposal selected by the ISC is R-Hub. R-Hub will provide a vital pre-CRAN build and check process, designed to give package developers a facility to test their proposed builds before it goes to CRAN, making the process quicker for developers and easier for the CRAN volunteers.

The next proposals to be accepted, will need to be submitted by January 10, 2016 and the announcements will be made mid-February. On the R Consortium site, the ISC have provided guidance and information on the process.

To help get you started, Mango’s Steph Locke has built a template proposal that you can customise for your own proposal. This template is intended to be extensive but will need customising, whether that’s reducing the number of sections to reflect a very modest proposal, or to add specific topical sections.

At Mango, we actively encourage our consultants to contribute to the community and they’re working on a number of proposals for consideration; one of the most recent is the satRday – user-group driven conferences, facilitated by the R Consortium.

We strongly encourage all our readers to think about the things they wish could be better and come up with some ideas about how they could help solve the improve the situation. We will help raise awareness and give feedback on any proposals pre-submission so if you have an idea, let us know by either tweeting us directly @MangoTheCat or using the hash-tag #ISCProposal!