rOpenSci Announces a New Award From The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to Improve the Scientific Package Ecosystem for R

Author : Karthik Ram

Today we are pleased to announce that we have received new funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The $894k grant will help us improve infrastructure for R packages and enable us to move towards a science first package ecosystem for the R community. You may have already noticed some developments on this front when we announced our automated documentation server back in June. Over the coming months we plan to roll out more tools and services to make it easier to maintain and distribute packages while capturing the impact of such work.

Read the full post: https://ropensci.org/blog/2019/11/06/scientific-package-ecosystem/

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WOW. What exciting news and a potentially impactful project. Congratulations!

Just throwing this in the mix: In the past I have really enjoyed the AUR’s model for a transparent crowd-driven platform that manages packages for Linux: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rstudio-desktop-preview-bin/

can you explain what this means?

I was thinking along these lines:

Open in the sense that barriers to entry are low (as compared with clearing controversial autocratic policies).

Transparent in the sense that community can see the script that compiles the package, discussion relating to build issues, and ratings given by other community members (collaborative filtering).

Of course there is scope for more useful stuff along both those axis, so I am not saying this replicating this should be the exact goal, but I think it serves its community well.

Fully agree on low barriers to entry, and transparent. It’ll be important to get the social aspects right.

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