The R Consortium actively supports new projects to help R development both technically and organizationally. Improving R infrastructure and building for long term stability are key goals of the R Consortium. These types of support cannot be matched by individual companies.
The newest three projects that have been awarded grants have been announced. Congratulations to R-global, R ecosystem for meta-research, and R Community Collaboratives. These ambitious projects cover two technical areas – focusing on geographical coordinates and evidence synthesis – as well as resources and support to facilitate on-the-ground organization of community R events.
In total, over $50,000 in new grants were approved.
More projects will be funded soon. Is your R project one of them? See below for more information on applying for funding.
R-global: analysing spatial data globally
Edzer Pebesma (edzer.pebesma@uni-muenster.de)
https://github.com/r-spatial/global/
Currently, a number of R spatial functions assume that coordinates are two-dimensional, taken from a “flat” space, and may or may not work for geographical (long/lat) coordinates, depicting points on a globe. This project will try to make such functions more robust and helpful for the case of geographical coordinates. It will reconsider the concept of a bounding box, and build an interface to the S2 geometry library (http://s2geometry.io/), which powers several modern systems that assume geographic coordinates.
Expanding the ‘metaverse’; an R ecosystem for meta-research
Martin Westgate (martin.westgate@anu.edu.au)
https://rmetaverse.github.io
Evidence synthesis is the process of identifying, collating and summarizing primary scientific research to provide reliable, transparent summaries such as systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Despite their importance for linking research with policy, however, evidence synthesis projects are often time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to update. Open and reproducible workflows would help address these problems, but these workflows are poorly supported by the current package environment, preventing access by new users and hindering uptake of the well-developed suite of statistical tools for meta-analysis in R. The metaverse project will integrate and expand tools to support evidence synthesis and meta-research in R; suggest flexible workflows to complete these projects in a straightforward and open manner; and provide a collector package allowing easy access to these developments for new and experienced users.
R Community Collaboratives
Angela Li (angela@angelalidata.com)
https://github.com/unconf-toolbox
Previously known as the Unconf Toolbox, R Community Collaboratives provide resources and support to facilitate on-the-ground organization of community events. These events engage individuals in the R community through in-person collaboration on open source projects. R Collabs emphasize learning and mentorship, encouraging R users to become R developers. They are inspired by the unconference organized by rOpenSci, but are designed to encourage local organizers to put on events for their own community. To do so, this project develops useful technical and logistical infrastructure for R Collab organizers. These include a website template, an organizing handbook, and a project dashboard for reporting out.
Join the Grant Program!
Strengthening the R community by improving infrastructure and building for long term stability is one of the primary focuses of the R Consortium. To achieve this, the R Consortium’s Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) has developed a grant program to fund development of projects that broadly help the R community.
Everyone is encouraged to apply, regardless of experience or expertise!
For a description of the types of projects that are being funded, examples of previous projects, and more, please see our information here: https://www.r-consortium.org/projects/call-for-proposals
