This Thursday Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group (in polish Spotkania Entuzjastów R – SER – cheese) celebrated it’s 3rd birthday! Check this post to find out what we have prepared for this special occasion.

• Summary of three years of the group activity
• Toast
• Round tables session
• WRUG baseball jackets
• wser.pl, a new logo and occasional stickers
• Acknowledgements

Summary of three years of the group activity

At the beggining of the meeting, the initiator of the Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group, Przemysław Biecek, gave a talk during which he summed up the last 3 years or our activities and presented main activities around R package in Poland in last several years. The presentation is available here. Attendees could learn some history of the R expansions in Poland and were introduced to R applications in Poland in fields like: insurances, technological industry, health service, weather forecasting.

If you haven’t had a chance to see that presentation, you might consider attending next (20th) Poznań R Users Group (PAZUR) meeting (23rd March), where Przemysław will show a similar talk.

This was the 24th gathering of our Warsaw R community. During those 3 years we grown so much that we exceeded 1300 users on our meetup group. Together we have had 44 presentations, 13 workshops, 2 data analysis hackathons, 1 meeting with a machine learning videos from youtube, we have supported the organization of the European R Users Meeting and we have started organizing Polish R Users Conference – Why R? 2017.

Toast

After the presentation we had a cake and the champagne. The toast for 3 consecutive years of successful meetings, raised more than 50 people. We even had the honor to host the representation of trigeR (TriCity R Enthusiasts Group), STWUR (Wroclaw R Users Association) and R-Ladies Warsaw Group (that are co-organized next to Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group).

Round tables session

Round table is a form of academic discussion. Participants agree on a specific topic to discuss and debate. Each person is given equal right to participate, as illustrated by the idea of a circular layout referred to in the term round table. – Wikipedia

As this is becoming more popular, we organized a round tables session with 6 various topics, including: R in education, R in business, Machine Learning, Shiny + Rmarkdown, R Freelancing, R integrations with other tools. Tables can be seen on this occasional photo of all attendees of the session. We planned a 1 hour long discussion but few tables lasted longer. Last attendees left the event almost 4 hours after we started the meeting.

WRUG baseball jackets

Yes! It’s not a coincidence that few people from a previous photo have the same outfit! For that occasion Alicja Gosiewska and Aleksandra Dąbrowska (our new co-organizers) prepared baseball jackets of Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group. So far 21 participants have ordered such gifts. I appealed this initiative so much that I have decided to subsidize those baseball jackets a bit.

wser.pl, a new logo and occasional stickers

We went even further, and created (with a help of Emil Buszyło) a new website of Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group (in polish: Warszawskie Spotkania Entuzjastów R (WSER)). It’s available here – wser.pl (still a little bit under construction). I am amazed by the timeline of our meetings. Baseball jackets, the website and occasional stickers were enriched by the new logo (by Klaudia Korniluk from Pędzlenie na zlecenie).

Acknowledgements

I would like to express a gratitude for Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group organizers: Przemysław Biecek for his ideas and passion; Olga Mierzwa-Sulima for her titanic work, business ideas and R-Ladies Warsaw initiative; Alicja Gosiewska and Aleksandra Dąbrowska for their huge support in the last few months; Natalia Potocka for the engagement in R-Ladies Warsaw.

Also I would like to thank eRka (Cracow R Users Group) for the exchange of experiences and ideas on how to properly organize an R meetup these days. Bartosz Sękiewicz, Zygmunt Zawadzki, Piotr Ocalewicz and Adam Wróbel – keep going guys with the good work you do for the Cracow R community.