Following up on Stefanie’s recap of unconf 17, we are following up this entire week with summaries of projects developed at the event. We plan to highlight 4-5 projects each day, with detailed posts from a handful of teams to follow.skimr Summary: skimr, a package inspired by Hadley Wickham’s precis package, aims to provide summary statistics iteratively and interactively as part of a pipeline.

We held our 4th annual unconference in Los Angeles, May 25-26, 2017. Scientists, R-software users and developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profits came together for two days to hack on projects they dreamed up and to give our online community an opportunity to connect in-person. The result?

For a fourth year running, we are excited to announce the rOpenSci unconference, our annual event loosely modeled on Foo Camp. We’re organizing #runconf17 to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profits to get together for a couple of days to hack on various projects and generally enrich our community. The agenda is mostly decided during the unconference itself.

On April 21st and 22nd of 2016, we had 40 members of the R community gather in Brisbane, Australia, with the goal of reproducing the rOpensci Unconference events that have been running with great success in San Francisco since 2014. Like every event organisers ever, we went through the usual crisis: Where will it be? Will anyone actually show up? Is the problem space over venue, date, attendees, catering, sponsors convex?

The rOpenSci Unconference is coming to Australia and we are excited!! The event will take place in sunny Brisbane, on April 21-22 2016 hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Centre.

The rOpenSci project is a poster child for the fluid collaboration that has become increasingly common these days thanks to platforms like Twitter and GitHub. It has been really inspring to see open discussions take shape as rough ideas, which rapidly turn into prototype research software, all of which are now happening in the order of few days to weeks rather than months to years.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts from rOpenSci’s recent hackathon. I recently had the pleasure of participating in rOpenSci’s hackathon. To be honest, I was quite nervous to work among such notables, but I immediately felt welcome thanks to a warm and personable group. Alyssa Frazee has a great post summarizing the event, so check that out if you haven’t already.

Our team has been cranking out a large number of tools over the past several months. As regular readers are aware, our software packages provide programmatic access to a diverse and extensive trove of scientific data. More recently we’ve expanded our efforts to build more general purpose and cross-domain tools.