Today I’d like to draw attention to a workshop that Jeffrey Meisel gave at the Open Data Science Conference East (ODSC East) in Boston last weekend. Jeff is the Chief Marketing Officer of the US Census Bureau, and for a few months we’ve been talking about how to improve communication between the Census Bureau and the R community.

You can see the material from Jeff’s workshop here. The workshop has three exercises: integrating census data with CartoDB, R and Python.

Why is this Important?

Over the last few years I’ve come to realize two things:

1. The Census Bureau has a ton of interesting data
2. It’s hard to figure it all out on your own

For example, my free course Learn to Map Census Data gives a good introduction to with census data in R. But it only scratches the surface of the data. I would require additional training to create a course on more complex uses of the data.

The fact that Jeff took the time to run a workshop at ODSC speaks volumes about his commitment to helping people make good use of this data.

Want to Help?

Before writing this I asked Jeff how other R developers could help make better use of Census data. Here is his answer

Invitation to join Census API Beta Testers Group

The Census Bureau is looking for beta testers to help improve their APIs, CitySDK, and soon to be released features for R and Python users.  If anyone wants to join our beta program, please send an email to Jeff Meisel, Chief Marketing Officer, at [email protected] and he will provide more details.

You can also raise awareness of this opportunity by tweeting the following:

Be on the cutting edge of US #opendata, join @uscensusbureau’s API Beta Testers Group! #rstats cc: @jffmsl
Click To Tweet

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