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ISC working groups provide the mechanism through which the ISC can explore, fund, and manage large collaborative projects. There are primary two modes of collaboration that may make a proposal well suited to be a WG:

  1. The advice or collaboration of subject matter experts is required to decide the merit or feasibility of a project.
  2. The work required for the project requires the skills not possessed by a single individual, or the amount of work required is more than can be accomplished by a single person in a reasonable amount of time.

Benefits of Forming an ISC Working Group

Your project will be:

  • Vetted by the relevant experts
  • Sanctioned by the R Consortium
  • Receive the attention of the R Foundation
  • Become visible to the greater R Community
  • Administrative support from the R Consortium

Active Working Groups


Census: Is developing package recommendations, and other materials for working with census data.

R7 Package: Object-Oriented Programming. The R7 package is a new OOP system designed to be a successor to S3 and S4. It has been designed and implemented collaboratively by the R Consortium Object-Oriented Programming Working Group, which includes representatives from R-Core, BioConductor, RStudio/tidyverse, and the wider R community.

R / Business: R users from different areas of business and financial services collaborating on events and advocacy of R.

R Certification: Is working to establish a common certification program for proficiency in R.

R Repositories: Collaboratively exploring how to support, maintain, and improve the tooling for R package distribution.

R Tables for Regulatory Submission (RTRS): Develop standards for creating tables that meet the requirements of FDA submission documents

R Validation Hub: Working to devise a standard for validating packages for the regulated Pharmaceutical industry and create a online repository that will be free to use.

Submissions: Focus on IT and platform challenges that must be addressed in order to make “all R” regulatory submissions.

Active working groups have public mailing lists to facilitate discussions.

Completed Working Groups

histoRicalg: This project aims to document and test older Fortran and C and other code that is still essential to the R ecosystem, possibly creating all-R reference codes, hopefully by teaming older and younger workers so knowledge can be shared for the future.

Future-proof native APIs for R: Is working to assess current native API usage, gather community input, and work towards an easy-to-understand, consistent and verifiable API that will drive R language adoption.

R IDEA: Now a Top Level Project. R Community Diversity and Inclusion is a group broadly considering how the R Consortium can best encourage and support diversity and inclusion in the R Community.

Unified Framework for Distributed Computing in R: Exploring the feasibility of developing a common framework to standardize the programming of distributed applications inR.

Distributed Computing: Endorse the design of a common abstraction for distributed data structures in R.

Inactive Working Groups

Code Coverage: Develop a tool that addresses feature and platform limitations of existing tools. Helping to improve R software quality through the development of a code coverage tool and promoting the use of code coverage more systematically within the R ecosystem.