Licenses are an important topic within open source. Without licenses, information or code can be publicly available but not legally available for reuse or redistribution. The open source software community’s most common licenses are the MIT license or the GNU GPLv3. When you read the MIT or GNU license, you can see they are rather specific: and They aim to cover primarily software, not other forms of information such as, for example, data.

rOpenSci’s second cohort of Champions has been onboarded!Their training first started with a session on code style, was followed by three sessions on the basics of R package development, and ended with a session on advanced R package development, which consisted of a potpourri of tips with discussion, followed by time for applying these principles to the participants’ packages.Here, I want to share one of the topics covered: Package testing, and

Now that you have created your package, presenting it to the world is a crucial step to gain visibility and attract users . Marketing your package effectively contributes to reaching the people your package can support, finding users to assist you in maintaining and improving your package and allowing you to learn about how people use it. In this blog post we suggest a series of activities and tools for advertising your

The package qualtRics maintained by Julia Silge together with Joseph O’Brien provides functions to access survey results directly into R using the Qualtrics API. Qualtrics is an online survey and data collection software platform. Help test or improve qualtRics! Are you a heavy user of the Qualtrics survey tooling in general, and of the qualtRics R package in particular? Then you can help build and test the package. How to help?

The package targets maintained by Will Landau, and its companion packages, are pipeline tools, that coordinate the pieces of computationally demanding analysis projects. Help sustain targets discussion forums!

The package assertr maintained by Tony Fischetti, provides functionality to assert conditions that have to be met so that errors in data used in analysis pipelines can fail quickly.The provided functionality is similar to stopifnot() but more powerful, friendly, and easier for use in pipelines. Contributed to assertr!

rOpenSci’s second cohort of champions was onboarded!Their training started with a session on code style, which we will summarize here in this post.Knowing more about code quality is relevant to all Champion projects, be it creating a new package, submitting a package to software review, or reviewing a package.This training session consisted of a talk and discussion, whereas the next package development training sessions will be more hands-on.

The package waywiser maintained by Mike Mahoney provides ergonomic methods for assessing spatial models.Assessing predictive models of spatial data can be challenging,both because these models are typically built for extrapolating outside the original region represented by training data and due to potential spatially structured errors,with “hot spots” of higher than expected error clustered geographically due to spatial structure in the

We recently introduced a new paragraph to the development version of our dev guide This complements the statistical software review requirement for Bayesian software. This tech note’s aim is to make the new requirement louder, demonstrate some approaches to verbosity control, and to gather community feedback!