The R Consortium recently reached out to Umar Isah Adam to find out more about the status of the R User Group Kano. Umar is a freelance data analyst who works as a part-time typist, data analyst, and volunteer mathematics teacher at a local school. Umar loves to write programs and enjoys contributing to society. He graduated from the Federal University of Dutse in 2017 and holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He is an organizer of the Google Developers Group (GDG) Dutse. After his graduation, he picked up an interest in data science and went for a series of courses including a nano degree online from Udacity, and R and Python programming from Coursera.
When he’s not programming or leading the R User Group Kano, Umar loves to play video games and watch movies.
What is the R community like in Nigeria?
In my opinion, the R community is doing well in Nigeria, but it can be better. We should work to make the whole R community connected and in touch with one another. We should be tracking progress and sharing experiences. Live events should be organized across the country, maybe once or twice a year. This would help to strengthen the R community, and it will help a lot in reaching out to others. It will also help the new chapters grow and acquire more audience. Furthermore, the younger generation needs to be engaged in the communities in order to help grow the community in the future.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future? How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
COVID drastically affected our ability to connect with members because most of the time the people we are trying to reach are new to programming or to the R language, so meeting them in person has a significant effect on their interest and confidence. Most of the time we are meeting online we experience a lot of internet connection problems, this gives us a lot of headaches in achieving what we want to achieve. We have tried using different techniques to connect, but it is not working out well. It’s not all negative. Video conferencing and other technologies can be used in the future to make the group more inclusive to those who cannot attend.
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
Young adults are leaving secondary and tertiary schools, and with the rate of unemployment, the tech ecosystem is enlarging and areas like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, etc. are gaining visibility. These young people have to learn R and Python.
I see a lot of people wanting to learn R. In fact, I don’t think we will be able to accommodate the massive crowd of new R learners in the coming year. There are no proper certification courses for these people, and the issues of access to the internet and computers poses a threat to this growth.
R-Medicine is my favorite, because it will bring a real change in the medical field, it will save lives, and help grow a healthy world. I’ll be glad to have an opportunity to be with the team.
When is your next event? Please give details!
The time of our next event is not fixed yet. However, we are currently collaborating with Global AI hub to reach out to Secondary schools, and the program is expected to be continuous. Secondary students from selected schools will be given the opportunity to engage in a code lab with hands-on experience.
I realized most of the R community members are not as young as I thought, and for the future of the community, younger generations will have to be engaged and trained for them to be able to help the R community and brainstorm some exemplary solutions for the community. Given the current situation, schools will be chosen based on the availability of computers and interest of the students to be introduced to programming. All interested students can join regardless of their classes. This opportunity will be used to introduce R to the students, showcase its power and highlight some interesting projects that are done in R to capture their attention.
Folajimi Aroloye is a data analytics professional and educator. He is the organizer for the Lagos R User Group. He is involved in capacity building. Folajimi started his data science journey in December 2017, using R at Wema Bank in Nigeria. According to him, it has been both challenging and exciting fitting into different roles and wearing different hats in the organization.
What is the R community like in Nigeria?
The community in Nigeria has grown over time, and it is exciting to see how many people use R. The user groups and occasional meetups have encourage people to come out of their shells. Although it may seem that there are no R users, our meetups are usually packed. The recently concluded useR conference had many Africans registering as attendees and most of them were Nigerians.
The Lagos RUG started in March 2019. Interest is not limited to R user groups; several data science communities also use R. While some use Python, others use both R and Python programming languages.
I can firmly say that the R language is gaining more ground in Africa, especially Nigeria. Several financial institutions, tertiary schools, and organizations use R to carry out research and execute their day-to-day activities. It is an interesting space to be a part of, more effort just needs to be made to create awareness and drive the adoption for the use of R.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future? How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
In a way, I don’t think we were affected by COVID. WhatsApp has been the major platform for communication, but we were already leveraging these types of platforms prior to this time. We have a Slack group, but communication wasn’t seamless as some people found it hard to keep up with messages on the platform. We employed the use of WhatsApp for community engagement and collaborated more on Github.
What COVID did for us was to help us save funds. For all our meetups, we made refreshments available and also had to pay for spaces we used for these meetups, so COVID helped us save money as we moved to a more virtual space. The money was converted and used to pay for much larger access on Zoom to accommodate more persons.
Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
At an event last year, we had an interesting session on “Machine learning with R.” It was an eye-opener. From the analysis we took of the attendees, we had more beginners in the community, and it was interesting to new R users as well as Machine Learning enthusiasts. It was facilitated by Oluseyi Obaloluwa Ajayi, one of the members of the community. We spent most of the year 2019 building the right competence in data analytics and entering into the year 2020, we saw the need to progress in the data science learning path.
The model we run in Lagos is an open and safe space; this means any member can speak. Our system is designed to expose new talents to the community and other larger companies. The only session I facilitated was the orientation in 2019. Members of the user groups are allowed to speak about their growth, challenges, and what they are currently learning. We have an executive body that organizes these meetups and reaches out to speakers.
We are not biased in the sense that we have created opportunities for everybody to speak despite their levels of programming knowledge. From beginners to professionals our user group allows members to have the stage. We are building the Lagos R users group to be the template for other user groups in Nigeria and across Africa.
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
I see a lot of people coming into Data Science as Africa is the hotspot for new tech talent. Also, a lot of people are using Python for data science, but other sectors like financial institutions and research institutes use R which means data scientists and data analysts would need to use R more for their analysis. So, a new trend would be a blend of the use of R and Python for data science across Africa.
Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
I am not aware of any on a personal level, but some organizations use R in Data Journalism. Notable mentions include Stears Business, Nairametrics, and many more. These organizations have a knack for using data to help create public awareness and education on key matters that affects society.
SatRdays and Software Carpentry R Instructor Training; additional support for trainers and facilitators. With SatRdays, there has been a rich source of resources for newbies and the R community.
Code Coverage: supporting the ecosystem and making available the best and updated tools to use is high for me on my choice of the Active Working Groups I see as a favorite. Having a tool that supports the breadth of the R language across multiple platforms, and that is used by R package developers and R core teams, helps to improve software quality for the R Community.
When is your next event? Please give details!
Presently, I can’t go into details but we will have a virtual 1-day session to evaluate the past year and plan for the future.
Alimi Eyitayo is a Graduate of Computer Engineering and a social engineering professional with over 12 years of experience in the field of information technology. She is an international speaker and an education advocate. Her quest for knowledge motivated her to embark on virtual reality research which was published as the first virtual reality research work in Africa which she demystifies in TEDx talks and other presentations.She’s a Software Engineer that chooses to build people – especially women in technology – over building products. She’s a Cloud Solutions Architect at IBM, and you can connect with her on LinkedIn.
What is the R community like in Nigeria?
The R community in Nigeria is growing steadily. The R-Ladies Lagos user group was founded in September 2019. Sponsorship support is a challenge as well as R language acceptability. There are larger data communities already in existence, and we have to help most people understand why they should use R.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
In the past, we have arranged for virtual connections and events but that also has been challenging. Some of our community members have the challenge of staying focused at home because of the house chores while others need access to the Internet to remain consistent over time. When COVID happened it presented us with even greater challenges – economic change, local and global lockdown, and some other incidents created a very tough situation for physical – and often time – virtual connectivity. There are also some internal challenges with a diversity – women-focused – group like ours. Owing to this feedback, a hybrid-seasonal event will give optimum support.
Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
We had the Data Science Nigeria team come to one of our events at a university campus to speak on “Getting started with data science.” This event was interesting because we had the opportunity to access the student community, and it came as an opportunity to get newbies started with Data Science using the R language
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
I see more women tending towards data visualization and statistical implementation. As a technology community, more effort, support, and training from the community will sprout more interest. Women are interested in emerging technologies but adequate training and support will move them from interest to implementation.
Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
None that I am aware of but as a member of the WHO infodemic exercises, that is one impact project I have been a part of as it helps people – software engineers and journalists – come together to work on projects and technologies that help flag misinformation while also providing professional journalistic views and reporting.
The R Community Diversity and Inclusion. I’ve been directly involved in 3 user conferences and twice served on the community diversity and inclusion team. This is my favorite because It directly touches the humans working on the technology. Although this community diversity and inclusion working group in the R foundation has a lot of improvement to do, the fact that it touches the lives of people is something I’m really happy about.
When is your next event? Please give details!
We currently do not have an event scheduled. The community is currently on break and our next event will be scheduled for the first quarter of 2022.
R consortium had a discussion with Asimbongeni Dhlodhlo, one of the key leaders spearheading the ZimR UseRs group in Zimbabwe. He talks on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected them as a community and how they are dealing with the current global crisis. Being a community dominated by students, R is gaining popularity in the country especially after the introduction of a degree in data science by some universities. Asimbongeni also has an interesting take on seeing R running on serverless environments.
What is the R community like in your country?
The R community in Zimbabwe is young, driven by demand for workers with programming skills. Our members are people who have a background in computer programming. Recently, there has been an introduction of data science degrees in three universities in the country. Five years ago, we did not have data science as a degree in Zimbabwe. R is being used in these universities as part of their core curriculum which has brought an increase in R members in the group.
Also, Zimbabwe is facing a serious unemployment problem, but NGOs are growing. These NGOs normally come with their own standards such as the kind of software to be used, which has caused an upward trend in the use of R. R is being used by NGOs for data cleaning, analysis and visualization. The largest group making up the R community in Zimbabwe are students from universities, not people in business.
How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
It has been a horrible time for us. Here in Zimbabwe we had an early lockdown, even when the numbers for COVID cases were quite low. This really affected us from meeting physically. The numbers are low even now but our borders still remain closed.
We haven’t had a lot of events on just R. What we have done is to partner with the data science community which is bigger than ours, including a Python one that is popular. Whenever there is a Python Zimbabwe or data science event, we are always part of it, but that was like 2-3 years ago. We have tried using virtual meetings however, internet connectivity has been an issue of major concern. Most of our users being students, we cannot do a long meeting because the majority may not afford the internet costs. We have been using WhatsApp as a discussion board where people ask questions, help with challenges. But it’s been a horrible time.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
We have been using virtual meetings, but did not get good numbers and the numbers drop quickly during virtual meetings. The maximum we can do is 2 hours, beyond that the numbers start falling.
The main platform we are using right now is WhatsApp, but then it has limits on the number of people. We have never used GitHub. WhatsApp is the only tool we are using to connect, but I doubt that we can continue using it moving forward. People get excited when there is a physical conference; they want to meet, interact, and travel to different locations. They really enjoy that. Unfortunately, we cannot replicate that virtually.
For us, the ideal thing is to meet physically. I’m just hoping this whole COVID crisis goes away.
Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
We had Kundai Gwatidzo who did an analysis on tracking the number of burials during COVID. He used Sentinel satellite imagery to track graves. On the satellite image there is a shadow that shows when there is a grave that has been dug. He went ahead to analyze that and then used a classification algorithm that tracks the shadows and produces a count for a specific cemetery in the past week. Using this, we were able to have a weekly count of graves, if there are no clouds. This particular presentation was a “wow” moment for us as a community.
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
People have always enjoyed R since it is easier to learn than other languages. The learning curve allows people to jump on fast. What’s more interesting for me in the future is to see R being used in serverless environments like Docker plus other serveless platforms. There has been a lot of work that has been done to make R easier using packages, such as Machine Learning packages and R MarkDown.
R has always been strong in visualization, ggplots is one of the best packages out there. It makes creating graphs a beautiful thing to do.
When is your next event? Please give details!
The plan was to have an event in February. We are hoping that it will be a physical event because here the policy is that if you are vaccinated you are allowed to meet physically. However, with the Omicron variant, it’s unclear. We are keeping our fingers crossed.
For me the one that stands out is the Google Earth Engine (GEE) with R project since it is trying to link R to the Google Earth Engine. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is data intensive and it requires a lot of computation power. If that comes together by leveraging Google’s computation power, it would be an exciting project to watch.
Jonathan Lin of the Calgary R User group (meetup | website) talks to R Consortium about their adaptation into the COVID world and their struggles with the higher production value of videos. He also talks about the importance of making statistics and math more approachable to kids to get them more interested in data science in general.
RC: What is the R community like in Calgary?
JL: Speaking of the R community, it’s pretty diverse in Calgary. The main organizers are academic, and I joined primarily with a business background. A large portion of our audience comes from academia and statistical backgrounds, so our discussions are oriented towards studies and dissertations. We also get businesses and petrochemical engineering talks, too, being an Oil & Gas centric hub. The combination makes for a very diverse and interesting set of discussions.
RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
JL: Up until this year, we hosted exclusively in-person meetings. While we would post slides after for people to use, we were limited by time needed to properly record our meetings. COVID has forced us to be more accessible. Having online meetings has increased our reach. We were able to advertise to a much wider audience, and also get a bigger range of both speakers outside of Calgary and even Canada. For instance, Edmonton is 3 hours away, and we were able to get a speaker that we wouldn’t have been able to consider before.
There are some downsides, however. On Zoom, we have less banter and conversation. Our Zoom meetings follow a fairly basic format – the presenter presents, our members ask a few questions, and then participants leave. We also find its harder to organically identify speaking opportunities – Chel Hee Lee (co-organizer) has done an amazing job finding speakers during this time, and we are always looking for contributors.
We wanted to experiment with other platforms to try and break out from this pattern. We tried wonder, the online conferencing app. It showed a lot of promise, and the interaction was good. Zoom has significant momentum, so asking our users to try something new is a culture shift. The general shyness of online users (especially face to face) is a challenge – online, there is little incentive and lots of risk for individuals to engage with strangers.
There is no substitute for in-person communication… but after doing several meetings online, there is a lot we can learn and integrate back into our in-person meetings.
RC: In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
JL: We used GitHub since day 1. This is a great way to show a presence both online and locally. It allows people to see prior meetings presentations, code, and other materials. This gave us a relatively easy transition for distributing materials when we started hosted online.
Recording videos is new to us, however. The need for reuse means we need to focus on higher production values, including additional post-event updates.
The technical issues that come with it are worth the effort though. Having greater access to individuals with disabilities, or even those balancing family life, is the obvious benefit that comes from these changes. It enables access on our YouTube channel, allowing more people to access our content, regardless of their status.
Ideally we’d continue recording videos, and would love ideas on how to easily put event videos onto Youtube.
RC: Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
JL: When we have presenters who have done academic work, they come in with a very novel aspect to problem-solving. Abed Ayyad gave a talk about how Alberta has the best solar exposure in Canada. And he didn’t just tell us, but he showed us along with the calculations. Another was by Danielle Clarke on bee habitats and bioversity can be affected by the shape of the habitat, and modelled with GIS and Landscape Analysis. She turned everything into a grid, how diversity was in each grid, and how a change in one area affects other areas. This application of R techniques to academic topics is something that tangibly demonstrates how to apply R to specific problems. I love seeing the cross-pollination of R (pun intended).
RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
JL: We’re getting a steady stream of new R users coming into our organization, who want to learn how to use R. We are thinking of doing workshops and helping the community. It is one thing to host these user groups, but actively teaching and learning would be a highly effective way to improve our community.
RC: Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
JL: I was watching Twitter and we had a recent municipal election where one of the people running was investigated after initial voting had taken place. One analysis used R to review how his votes changed from pre-voting to the day of elections. None of them were in our CalgaryR User Group, but it’s awesome to see other Calgarians using R for their work.
JL: They’re all great, and the following are especially of relevant to us:
Setting up an R-Girls-School Network is where we really want to get kids involved with coding earlier.
The Java interactive visualization looks neat. I’m excited about that one. R is blessed with lots of visualization packages, and there are always advantages with one package over another, so I look forward to seeing what this one brings.
JL: Distributive Computing and R Certification both are interesting to me.
Regarding the R Certification – How would you go around getting a common certification in R? Being previously “certified” in a different programming language, I found that certifications do not always indicate a strong competency in the language.
I feel like Distributive Computing could use some development in the R system due to some of the issues going on currently with data size.
RC: Four projects are R Consortium Top-Level Projects. If you could add another project to this list for guaranteed funding for 3 years and a voting seat on the ISC, which project would you add?
JL: Similar to my earlier answer on supporting “R Girls,” one of my co-organizers (Cliff) is strongly passionate about “R kids,” supporting statistics and math fluency for kids. It would help to make coding and statistics more approachable and embedded in the minds before they reach high school. Visualizations, graphs, interactivity and discovery would all help make R more accessible to kids.
R Consortium talked to Raoul Wolf of the Oslo UseR! Group about the wide adoption of R in Norway, both in academia and industry. He explained how the pandemic initially hindered activities of the group, but they bounced back. The group took the opportunity to collaborate with other R communities and invite high profile international speakers for virtual events.
Raoul currently works as a Senior Advisor and Digital Developer within Sustainable Geosolutions at Norwegian Geotechnical Institute. Hailing from Germany, Raoul was first introduced to R when he began his PhD studies in Norway eight years ago.
When he’s not coding in R, Raoul enjoys the cultural life in Oslo and is really fond of the fantastic museums and the vibrant culinary scene.
What is the R community like in Norway?
I cannot talk on behalf of the entire R community in Norway, as we have several hubs of the R community. Oslo, as the capital of Norway, has the largest R community. But the R communities in other cities, e.g. Bergen, Trondheim or Tromsø, are also doing great things.
What I like about the R community is how very welcoming it is. This is true not only for Oslo, but all over Norway. It is a diverse community in terms of cultural backgrounds, professional backgrounds and identities. My professional background is from academia, and we have a vast base in academia in Oslo, but also people from consultancies and the industrial sectors.
We are lucky to be in the capital city here and can collaborate with the different communities that are already here and using R.
I need to mention that while I am the main organizer of our meetup group in Oslo, I have two wonderful co-organizers, Bethan Cropp and Henrik Galligani Ræder. At a certain point, both were regulars at our events and wanted to take a more proactive role in the community building here, and that’s a blessing. Between the three of us, we recruit speakers and organize events.
In Oslo, we not only have the UseR! Oslo meetup group, but also a great R Ladies meetup group. Across Norway, other R Ladies groups are really active as well, and we have had great contact with R Ladies Oslo and co-organized events. So we are really happy with this constellation in Oslo.
How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
Massively. It was an enormous challenge initially, but also presented new opportunities. Before the pandemic, we only had physical meetups. When the pandemic hit Europe in March 2020, we had events planned through the summer with confirmed speakers. We postponed our March event, hoping things would get back to normal in April or May. Luckily, Oslo useR!’s previous organizer Dmytro Perepolkin was able to present virtually on short notice, and subsequently we were able to transfer some of our planned physical events to virtual events.
At the end of 2020, we noticed that more and more meetups across Europe have turned virtual. We connected with a few of those meetup groups, but also reached out to international speakers who we thought would be interesting for our Oslo UseR! group.
In January 2021 we had our first “international” speaker, and it was a success event. We followed this pattern to mix up our local talent with some high-profile international speakers, and this has worked well for us. We have seen an increase in the number of people joining the meetup group and in the number of interactions. Along the way, we also figured out practicalities like moderating a chat box.
There was a steep learning curve, but the numbers went up considerably, and now we have over 1,900 members. It is very encouraging having 200+ people participating in our meetups. We started recording our meetups and put them on YouTube. Everyone can go back and watch the videos if they missed out on an event.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
We used the six months to figure out how we can continue with our meetups. We are lucky enough to have a colleague that is affiliated with the University of Oslo and they, very early on, had a professional Zoom license. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was a bottleneck to get people on a video conference like that, and we were lucky enough to have early access to such a platform. We quickly started reaching out to our local talent pool we were in contact with from before.
We are currently in contact with a tech community building where we plan to host our events once we go back to physical events. Additionally, we are exploring the possibility of hybrid events. Ideally we will have physical meetups with livestreams and recordings. This emphasizes our wish to stay in contact with as many people as possible, and to be more inclusive.
Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
There were a lot of interesting presentations this year. The one that impressed me the most was the one we had in January, which was our first international meetup.
The speaker was Paul Bürkner from Germany, and he talked about Bayesian Multilevel Modeling and presented his brms package. I have used the package before, and it is always a treat to have developers present their own packages. We got a lot of feedback and interaction in the chat box, and had an excellent discussion throughout.
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
That’s an interesting question! There are several parallel trends in R depending on your point of view. There is the ongoing trend of tidyverse that continues to develop into more ecosystem, like tidymodels. We get a lot of requests at the meetup for integrating R in a larger environment with databases, APIs and visualization tools. Besides the stereotypical use of R in academia, there is an increasing demand for using R in production and business use cases. Data journalism is also becoming more important, and there are some newspaper houses in Norway that are using R.
I don’t know if it qualifies as “trend”, but the positive spirit of dissemination and inclusion in R and the R community is really making a difference. We all witnessed how important it was during the pandemic, and it will be of equal importance moving forward.
Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health has presented some of its COVID research and predictions using R. The modeling and visualizations were done in R. It was one of the biggest impacts locally to see R prominently displayed in the public.
When is your next event? Please give details!
Our next meetup, “Wrapping Packages in R with {devtools} and Friends”, is scheduled for 16th of December. It will be our annual holiday season meetup, which traditionally is a bit more light-hearted. The first half will be about “wrapping packages,” demonstrating how to make packages in R. Afterwards, we want to have an open discussion with our community about how they have experienced the last year.
For next year, we are really excited about the planned events until spring. There are several interesting talks in the pipeline, and we will announce them as soon as we have finalized all details.
Two projects, actually. One is the project financing the webchem package. I have used the package in my academic work, and have directly benefited from having it available.
The other is the consolidation of R Ladies groups. It is both unique and beautiful, and demonstrates the idea of R being a welcoming and inclusive environment.
The R Community Diversity and Inclusion working group undoubtedly one of them. Even though I don’t have a direct connection, I think the R Validation Hub for the pharmaceutical industry is important. To get into regulatory territory is a huge step for any programming language, and I am happy to see that R is moving in this direction.
The R-Consortium talked to Novica Nakov of R Skopje about the challenges of managing an R User Group during the pandemic. Novica told us about the budding R community in North Macedonia and how shifting events online has not been useful for this tightly knit community. However, Novica hopes things will return to normal once they resume events in a physical space.
Novica is a long term free software enthusiast and has been working with the free software community in Macedonia since 2001. Originally from a Social Sciences background, Novica initially contributed to the community mainly on policy issues, legal issues and localization. He later learned R-programming during his postgraduate studies in the UK.
Before forming the R Skopje User Group, Novica was also involved in establishing a hacker space Kika in Skopje 10 years ago. This hacker space hosted Linux help forum days, general knowledge sharing events and one day conferences.
What is the R community like in North Macedonia?
North Macedonia is a small country, so it is lagging in certain areas as compared to the US. Before 2018-2019, there were very few Data Scientist or Data Analyst jobs available in the country. However, there has been a general shift in public interest ever since. The R community in Macedonia is still in its early stages.
How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
I started the R User Group in 2018, hoping to provide a knowledge-sharing space for people like myself who do not have a technical background but need to use a programming language for data analysis. We formed the User Group within the hacker space, as there was an established infrastructure available.
Before the pandemic, we were having regular meetings on Tuesdays. These meetings were like hands-on workshops where people helped each other with problems they faced while working with R. We also had presentations where members shared their projects with the group. Government ordered a lockdown in early 2020, and we had to shut down the hacker space. We also had to cancel the lease on the space.
As it was a tight-knit community which thrived on one-to-one interactions, lockdown significantly reduced the quality of communication between the members.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
After the lockdown, we had 2-3 online events that were R-specific in which different speakers presented. Besides that, we also moved all our regular events to Google Meet, but it didn’t work really well. Since it was a small community, people spent most of the time catching up with each other and had very little interest in the actual slides, etc.
We are talking about a really small country and a really small pool of people interested in data science. Just to give you an idea about the scale, there is a group called Data Science Macedonia, where the main organizer is a Macedonian companyScaleFocus. They used to host events at a local university which attracted around 150 people. Companies such as Slice used to present in these events and discussed possibilities of employment, which was interesting for people looking to start working in the data field.
Our group, on the contrary, consists of people who are simply curious to learn new programming languages, etc. for personal use. I think online meetings are not really good for such a group, because they don’t allow for person-to-person interactions for solving a particular problem.
We attempted having online workshops, but it didn’t work out as it required a lot of troubleshooting, which is really difficult unless you have physical access to the participant’s system. I think online meetings are not great for workshops.
We started talking about reopening the space, as many people are missing the ability to get together. I don’t know if this will happen, but if it does, we will resume our events in the physical space. But I am not very optimistic about the online events.
Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
I think the last presentation we had was by a Financial Data Analyst, Ljupcho Naumov, and the topic was optimizing your portfolio using R. This event turned out to be a huge success and around 300 people joined the online event.
I am not sure if people joined the event to learn R or to get free financial advice about getting rich. Another reason for the success of the event was that it coincided with the central bank lifting the ban on personal accounts for trading in foreign brokerage companies.
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
Given the situation, I don’t think R or development in any language would be as important as dealing with the health crisis.
Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
One media organization in Macedonia sometimes runs data driven stories, and I think they are connected by the European network called Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
Macedonia has joined this open data initiative recently and one non-government organization is running a project on creating datasets from local governments governance organizations.
There’s also this project I was working on where we were trying to create local datasets from data from local governments. I guess this is something that can potentially be used in journalism.
When is your next event? Please give details!
We don’t have a specific event in mind at the moment. However, as a lot of members in our events are women, I am hoping to connect them to R Ladies. R Ladies Belgrade is very active, and maybe we can have some sort of collaboration with them. I am also really interested in opening an R Ladies branch as we have this pleasant history of women getting involved in our space.
The R consortium talked to Mustafa CAVUS of the Eskisehir R Users Group (also on Twitter) about handling group activities during the pandemic. Mustafa shared that online events during the pandemic have allowed their group to evolve as a global forum for Turkish R users and hybrid events in the future will help them further increase their reach.
Mustafa is working as an Assistant Professor at Eskisehir Technical University, Department of Statistics and is also a visiting Postdoc Researcher at Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science. His research interests are in the areas of AutoML and Explainable AI.
What is the R community like in Turkey?
There are many R users in academia and industry in Turkey. Many people have become interested in package development and Shiny development beyond being a user. Especially in recent years the interest I have seen in the use of R in several fields in Turkey amazes me. From a statistician’s point of view I can see some interesting examples in urban planning and landscape architecture using geo-spatial data. I can say that there is a really large number of R users and enthusiasts in Turkey.
How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
Actually our user group was founded just before the pandemic. When we were planning our first meeting, we were unable to plan a face-to-face event due to the pandemic and we conducted all our activities online. Although this reduced the overall quality of communication, it also enabled us to meet many people outside of Eskisehir.
In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
We certainly use these methods e.g. video conferencing through Zoom is used often. I think many events will be planned as hybrids in future as we get better at using these techniques. And we are also using virtual tools to provide easy access to many people all over the world. We produced some content in the pandemic period for our Youtube Channel in Turkish with Uğur Dar, co-organizer of our community..
Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
As an Eskisehir R user group we had the opportunity to get together with R users from different cities in Turkey and even the world at the events we started. Over the time our group has evolved into a forum that is not just local.
We turned this harmony which we achieved together with Turkish R users living in different countries into a great environment.
The online conference we held in April 2021 with the support of Why R? Foundation and, of course, the R consortium, was the largest R conference held in Turkey to date with over 2500 registered and 800 on spot participants. We as an organization committee wrote about the details and our experiences in the “Conference Report of Why R? Turkey 2021 (PDF)” which was published in the latest issue of the R Journal also.
I think that each presentation at this event was interesting because it appealed to different audiences.
What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
Actually I know that with the conference held in April 2021 many researchers and professionals from industry started to work together by using R. My expectation for the next year is that this interaction will continue to increase, and we will see interesting usage examples of R in several disciplines.
Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
As far as I know, not in our community, but there is a quite interesting project on data journalism in Turkey called VeriPie. A group of undergraduate students from the department of statistics of Middle East Technical University are engaged in up-to-date data journalism practices mostly using R.
When is your next event? Please give details!
Actually, we are working on an online conference that we plan to organize for Turkish R users in the second quarter of 2022. The overwhelming interest in the event we organized last year motivated us to organize a more extensive event. It will consist of lightning talks, regular talks and also invited speakers. Last year our event just consisted of invited speakers.
This is a really tough question I think. My favorite is the RECON COVID-19 Challenge. It is a really promising project and actually I had interest in it but I couldn’t find enough time to contribute.
One of the difficult parts of running a group in an online space is maintaining social interactions that you would normally foster with in-person meetups. R Consortium talks to Adnan Fiaz about how he is attempting to create those interactions in the online meetups.
Adnan is Senior Data Scientist at National Grid in Birmingham, England. He is an analytics professional with a passion for mathematics and complex challenges. And outside of work and R, has a keen interest in playing football, cinema and general aviation.
RC: What is the R community like in Birmingham?
AF: I took over about 3 years ago. Before that, there were several meetings, but they slowed down quite a bit. I came in with quite a few new ideas. We started with 1 or 2 meetings every quarter. We had a good rhythm until 2020. It was getting harder to get speakers, but I was able to find them. We were able to have about 20 people attend the meetings and that was quite good for Birmingham. It was a mix of academics from the local university, NHS staff from the area, and scattered R Users that used it in their businesses. We also had new users and people who had been using it for years. It was very diverse.
RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
AF: We were struggling in the beginning because we didn’t know what to do. It depends on how you deal with it as an organizer and a community builder. I was leaning on face-to-face contact and others to help me out. Online, it was harder to engage with people and to ask for speakers from the local community. We didn’t have a meetup for 4 or 5 months. In the autumn we had a meetup. Then we didn’t have anything until the winter. At the beginning of this year, we decided to do meetings online and jumped on the bandwagon of the Global R community. We advertised their meetings on the Birmingham R page to give the community something to watch. Then we organized a meetup of our own in between their events. There is a lot less interaction with the members this way. People tend to be less interactive in online meetings and spaces. Since you must put a lot of effort into forcing socialization in these online spaces. I am looking forward to being able to go back in person.
RC: In the past year, did you have to change your techniques to connect and collaborate with members? For example, did you use GitHub, video conferencing, online discussion groups more? Can these techniques be used to make your group more inclusive to people that are unable to attend physical events in the future?
AF: Slack, Twitter, and Zoom are the technologies that we use mainly. We also have a GitHub page that we use. These allow a lot of people to attend our online meetings.
RC: Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
AF: We had several from the local meetup. We had a presentation/workshop from Birmingham University about mixed effect models by Bodo Winter. He explained mixed effect models from the basics of how they work as well as the more complex models that can be done. Once people had an understanding, they were able to ask more pointed questions. I was surprised because there was more engagement in the second part, mostly because people understood the concepts. There were a lot of questions, and people seemed to take it in a good way.
RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
AF: We will probably see more people branching into how to build different statistical models. In the last year, we saw packages brought into the tidymodels framework and building upon caret and splitting it, and building specific parts. In short, having better support for model building.
RC: Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
AF: I think one that got a lot of attention was the covid visualization by the Financial Times by John Murdoch. They were very informative. He also spent a lot of time discussing how he created them and engaging with everyone on Twitter.
AF: The most useful one to me is the R Ladies Project. I have used the materials from that project to start the meetup again as well as tips to increase engagement.
AF: I think the most interesting one is the R Certification. I remember when it was first proposed that it would be useful for meetups to give them a framework. We started with small segments before the meetup to start learning R in a beginner’s course. Just 10 minutes before the meetup to warm up. The R Certification would help guide that.
RC: There are four projects that are R Consortium Top Level Projects. If you could add another project to this list for guaranteed funding for 3 years and a voting seat on the ISC, which project would you add?
AF: I saw some work from Heather Turner on the future of R developers. That would be interesting to get more focus on because it would be good if we had more diversity in the core team of R Development.
How do I Join?
R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past 4 years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute.
To understand what R Ladies in Santiago is like, R Consortium talked to Riva Quiroga about how they are dealing with organizing and meeting during the pandemic. We also discussed how the chapter is becoming more inclusive and helpful to others in Santiago, as well as all of Chile and Latin America as a whole.
RC: What is the R community like in Chile?
The R community in Chile is very active and diverse. We have members who come from different fields and who have very different interests. There are members who have a STEM background, but also a lot of people from social sciences and the humanities. And they work in very different places: academia, industry, public services, ONGs, students, etc. There are currently four active RLadies Chapters, and one R User group.
The R user group in Chile started in 2012 in Santiago. I think I found out about them around 2015, but never attended an event because I wasn’t sure I would feel welcomed (it was an all-male group and I was just a beginner), and then they stopped organizing meetings. In 2017 they resumed their activities and we, the team that was planning the launch of RLadies Santiago, started attending. They supported us when we were starting our chapter in 2017, by helping us find venues for our first events. Since then, we see each other as collaborators. We have organized joint activities, and organizers and members of both groups have collaborated together in R-related projects (such as packages, courses, etc.)
2017 was the year the R community started growing at a very fast pace here. Chile is a very centralized country, so everything usually happens only in Santiago, the capital city. So it was great to see in the next few years new RLadies chapters in other parts of the country: Valparaíso (2018), Concepción (2019), and Talca (2020).
RC: How has COVID affected your ability to connect with members?
We were a very active group until October 2019, when we had to stop our activities due to social unrest in the country. Probably because it was a very difficult time for everyone, it didn’t occur to us to organize online events.
And then came COVID. Working remotely and online events became the “new normal,” so we decided to resume our activities. We saw this as an opportunity for collaboration between all the RLadies chapters. So since March 2020 all our activities have been branded as “RLadies Chile.” All our events are held via Zoom, thanks to the licenced account provided by DataUC. We post our videos on Vimeo and use GitHub to share code and materials.
Online events have been a great opportunity to make our community grow. We have been able to reach people in cities that currently don’t have an RLadies chapter, and also people who were unable to attend in-person events.
This means that our “local” community is now bigger than before. It is no longer limited to the four cities that have an RLadies chapter. People from different parts of Chile and Latin America are joining our events, and even spanish-speaking folks who live around the world. As a consequence, when possible, we try to organize our events in time slots that are not too late for someone based in Europe, and not too early for someone in México.
This collaboration between the four RLadies chapters to organize online events has been a great experience. On the one hand, it allowed us to connect with a broader community in a new way, so we plan to keep organizing online events even when meetings in person are back. On the other hand, we as organizers became closer. At least for me, having the opportunity to share time with such an awesome group of people has been one of the things that motivates me to keep going during these difficult times.
RC: Can you tell us about one recent presentation or speaker that was especially interesting and what was the topic and why was it so interesting?
A couple of months ago we ran an event about how we have been using R during the pandemic, and what new things we have discovered and learned. In that context, Alejandra Silva Tapia, the organizer of RLadies Talca, gave a talk about sonification techniques with R. In her presentation she not only showed some explorations she did with meteorological data using packages like {tuneR} and {sonify}, but also the teaching potential of these techniques. She shared her experience sonifying plots in order to explain statistical distributions to blind students. With just a couple of lines of code, she gave attendees a tool to make their learning materials more accessible.
It was so interesting that in our internal Slack we added a new channel to share our sonification experiments and new ideas on the subject.
RC: What trends do you see in R language affecting your organization over the next year?
There are currently more than 18000 packages on CRAN, and many of them are very field-specific, so it is very difficult to keep up to date with all the new possibilities that they offer. Therefore, it is very challenging to decide what new workshop to offer; what new package to share with our community. Should we run a workshop about something broad and general that might benefit anyone? Or do we target a specific audience that will benefit from learning about new packages or techniques for their field?
To face that challenge we have been trying to do a mix of both. We have organized workshops focused on general tasks, such as cleaning data, modeling, visualizing, etc., and also subject specific events. Organizing both types of workshops (general and specific) has been our way to attend the needs of a very diverse audience.
Another trend we are very happy to see is the discussion around diversity, inclusion, accessibility and algorithmic bias in Data Science. We are currently running a book club based on the book Data Feminism to discuss some of these topics. Discussing the social and ethical issues involved in coding and data science is something that interests all of us. And a safe space like RLadies is a great place for starting that conversation.
In regions like Latin America the decision about what workshops to offer is not trivial. Here, being able to understand English is, in most of the cases, a sign of privilege: you went to a private school, you had the opportunity to study abroad, you work in international projects, people in your family speak English, etc. And that is not very common. This means that RLadies chapters and R Users groups are sometimes the only place for many non-english speakers to learn about the new developments in R and Data Science. So when deciding which workshop to run, we have this in mind. We see this as part of our mission.
This was also the reason why the Latin American R community translated, as a joint effort, the book R for Data Science into Spanish. We saw the need (and impact) of having this kind of resource available for everyone who has interest in learning R.
Do you know of any data journalism efforts by your members? If not, are there particular data journalism projects that you’ve seen in the last year that you feel had a positive impact on society?
We have had journalists attending R Ladies events in the past, and we are very happy to see that some of them, who were also professors, started promoting the inclusion of R as part of their undergraduate curriculum.
Regarding the second question, there are three data journalism projects that have had a positive impact on society here in Chile, from my point of view. The first one is La bot, a Telegram and Facebook Messenger bot that sends you short and precise data based analysis of current issues. This is a women-led project that has received support and funding from the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. The team has made an amazing job showing new ways in which journalists can seek and connect with different audiences. And by always discussing current issues supported by data, La bot has also been a great way to fight the spread of fake news.
The second one are the reports Alejandra Matus did in the first months of the pandemic. She explored the death rates in Chile for the past ten years and exposed that the government was underreporting COVID deaths. She revealed that there was an excess death rate for March 2020 that the authorities were not explaining. They were only reporting PCR-positive patients who died at hospitals, not people who were dying at their homes or elderly nursing homes. Her work had a great impact. Not only because we started demanding more transparency from the government regarding COVID data, but also because many people began to realize the seriousness of the pandemic.
The third one is called Plataforma Telar. Chile is currently drafting a new constitution and, in this context, Plataforma Telar is using innovative methodologies to gather and analyze data related to this process (and they are using R!). What I find really interesting is that, although this is an interdisciplinary project based in academia, they have made alliances with networks like CNN Chile to showcase their findings to reach a broader audience.
RC: When is your next event? Please give details!
Our next event is the sixth session of the book club about “Data Feminism”, which will be held in late November. For December we are planning a workshop about building your first R package and one about using git/github in RStudio.
We have been able to be a very active chapter, even during the pandemic, mainly because of two reasons. First, because all our activities are the joint effort of the four RLadies chapters of our country. That makes all the planning easier and keeps us motivated. Second, because we plan the workshops not only taking into account what we already know, but also what we want to learn. For example, if I want to learn about a specific package, I will volunteer to run a workshop about it in a couple of months. That way I have an incentive and a deadline to achieve that objective. Because R Ladies is a collaborative and safe space, we feel comfortable running events that are not about something that we have already mastered, but about something we are currently learning.
Obviously, the R Ladies project is very dear to my heart. The support of the R Consortium has been crucial to offer current and prospective chapters the human and technological support to operate.
I also want to mention the SatRdays project led by Steph Locke and Gergely Daroczig. They developed a starter kit, a knowledge base, and all the infrastructure you might need to run your own SatRday.
SatRdays are accessible R-focused conferences organized by local R communities, that are held on Saturdays. In 2018 RLadies Santiago and the Santiago R Users group organized one of these events, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without all the support this project provided. That event was very important for growing our local community, so we planned another one for April 2020. But we had to suspend it due to the pandemic. We expect to be able to run it again in 2022.
I’m not sure if I have a favorite one, but I really like the idea of working groups that are focused on specific fields, like R/medicine and R/pharma. They are a great way to bring together people that are using R for similar purposes to collaborate on events and advocacy, and to make advances in different areas by promoting cooperation.
It would be great to see in the future similar working groups for other fields (e.g. R/social sciences, R/humanities, R/ecology, R/open government, etc.).
RC: There are four projects that are R Consortium Top Level Projects. If you could add another project to this list for guaranteed funding for 3 years and a voting seat on the ISC, which project would you add?
I would love to see a project about multilingualism. Currently there are many people working toward this aim, and not only by translating learning resources, but also by developing packages that take into account that English is not the only language that exists. For example, Michael Chirico has made a package called potools which allows you to internationalize your own package by translating user-facing communications (e.g., warnings, errors, etc.) into different languages. Also, the Datasketch team (Colombia) developed a package called Shi18y, that allows you to create multilingual Shiny apps. And a group of RLadies from Brazil and other countries from Latin America are currently developing a package with datasets in Portuguese for people to use when teaching/learning R, similar to the ones that already exist for Spanish and Turkish.
All these are great efforts that are helping to make R more accessible to non-English speakers. It would be great to see a Top Level Project that promotes these kinds of initiatives.
How do I Join?
R Consortium’s R User Group and Small Conference Support Program (RUGS) provides grants to help R groups around the world organize, share information and support each other. We have given grants over the past 4 years, encompassing over 65,000 members in 35 countries. We would like to include you! Cash grants and meetup.com accounts are awarded based on the intended use of the funds and the amount of money available to distribute.
