More components of the R ecosystem

This note lists a few of the organizations that are pushing the R language forward, as of early 2017. R is happy language right now.

Historically, the R Project for Statistical Computing has been supported by the R Foundation since its inception in 2002. It has laid down some of the most important building blocks of the R ecosystem, including, of course, CRAN, as well as the R Journal and the R mailing-lists.

Fifteen years later, many other organizations have been set up to help developing R and its user base, at various levels and through various means:

• The R Foundation has set up the R Foundation Taskforce on Women and Other Under-Represented Groups, which teams up with a new kind of R user group, R-Ladies, a worldwide initiative to encourage gender diversity in the R community.
• The R Consortium brings private-sector funds to R developers through grants for development and community projects. Its blog documents the progress made on each project, many of which are pretty awesome.
• The R-Bloggers blogs aggregator has been around for a while, and a new initiative launched last year, R Weekly, provides a more digestible list of R-related material, at a slower pace. The list is written collaboratively.
• Last but not least, the RStudio company develops the RStudio IDE and related things like Shiny, R server-side products, and many R packages. It also just recently held its very first conference, rstudio::conf.

This list does not cover the smaller organizations, such as the recently created r-spatial group, which help developing R packages for a myriad of different applications with often very different audiences.

I would say that R is pretty happy community right now. Getting help to use R is easier than ever, the quality of many new software releases is very high, and the user base is becoming more and more diverse, which is a huge (and indispensable) asset.

The next step might be to boost the job opportunities available to R users, and to better organise the ways that it is taught in universities, on online learning platforms like Coursera or DataCamp, or through private training firms.

Although there is no single way to keep track of everything going on in the R community, almost everything shows up on Twitter at some point, generally labelled with the #rstats hashtag.

Go and explore, and happy new year!