R Consortium Awards First Grant to Help Advance Popular Programming Language for Unlocking Value from Data

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rconsort_logoThe R Consortium, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and open source foundation to support the R user community, announced it is awarding its first grant to advance the infrastructure supporting the R programming language. Led by the R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC), the grant program provides financial support to projects that will address critical needs of the R user community.

The R Consortium ISC is organized to provide technical oversight and recommendations for grants for projects that help the R user community. The ISC grant program is designed to broadly support the R community including software development; developing new, teaching materials; documenting best practices; promoting R to new audiences; and standardizing APIs or doing research.

The R Consortium’s first grant is awarded to Gábor Csárdi, Ph.D., to implement R-Hub, a new service for developing, building, testing and validating R packages. R-Hub will be complementary to both CRAN, the major repository for open source R packages, and R-Forge, the platform supporting R package developers. R-Hub will provide build services, continuous integration for R packages and a distribution mechanism for R package sources and binaries.

Goals for R-Hub include:

  • simplify the R package development process: creating a package, building binaries and continuous integration, publishing, distributing and maintaining it;
  • provide services free for all members of the community;
  • encourage community contributions; and
  • pre-test CRAN package submissions to ease burden on CRAN maintainers.

R-Hub will modernize and improve the entire process of developing and testing R packages,” said Hadley Wickham, Infrastructure Steering Committee Chair, R Consortium. “We are dedicating a large portion of R Consortium resources to help fund projects that will help sustain the technical growth of the R community. We very much look forward to it.”

The ISC awards grants based on the critical nature of the problem(s) being addressed; the solvability of work involved; the amount of financial aid needed; and level of community support. Including today’s grant, the ISC plans to award nearly $200,000 in grants over the next several months. A community-wide call for proposals is now open until January 10, 2016. To submit a proposal or learn more information, please visit HERE.

The open source R programming language is used by statisticians, analysts and data scientists for statistical computing. It provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The R Consortium complements the work of the R Foundation, a non profit organization that develops and maintains the R language. The R Consortium focuses on user outreach and other projects designed to assist the R user and developer communities.

An R Consortium Forum panel discussion at the annual EARL Conference will be held with several member of the R Consortium Board, include JJ Allaire (RStudio), Lou Bajuk-Yorgan (TIBCO Software), Richard Pugh (Mango Solutions) and David Smith (Microsoft) on November 3 at 5 pm ET. For the full conference agenda, visit HERE.

R Consortium is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Collaborative Projects are independently supported software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so project hosts can focus on innovation and results. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology.

 

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