Dec 22, 2014

Software

• taxize v0.5.2 pushed to CRAN. Last version on CRAN was v0.4. This version has a lot of updates since v0.4. See releases: https://github.com/ropensci/taxize/releases
• rnoaa v0.3.3 pushed to CRAN. Last version on CRAN was v0.2. This version has a lot of updates. See releases: https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa/releases
• We updated our packages page again (http://ropensci.org/packages/) -this time making it easier to navigate by sorting packages within each section alphabetically, putting deep link headers for each section (e.g,. http://ropensci.org/packages/#literature) on the top of the page, and allowing deep linking to each package (e.g., http://ropensci.org/packages/#taxize). Thanks to Matt Jones for the suggestions.
• The maptools TaskView is now operational https://github.com/ropensci/maptools in the sense that we can now run make, and it should work, so we can start populating…I started adding some sections

Community

• We are starting to roll out our community discussion forum, its at http://discuss.ropensci.org/ - Supports email, twitter, github, and Mozilla Persona login. Not sure when it will be fully public yet….
• We announced a repo for community calls https://github.com/ropensci/commcalls - where we’ll announce new community calls, and people can discuss topics related to community calls
• Two blog posts last week: One announcing community calls http://ropensci.org/blog/2014/12/15/community-calls/ and another on curl in R http://ropensci.org/blog/2014/12/18/curl-options/

Events

• Karthik was at the American Geophysical Union Conference in SF http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2014/

rOpenSci in the news

• Just found that Karthik and ropensci got a shoutout in the book R for Cloud Computing: An Approach for Data Scientists
• Shoutout from SimplyStats blog http://simplystatistics.org/2014/12/17/a-non-comprehensive-list-of-awesome-things-other-people-did-in-2014/:

rOpenSci ran an awesome hackathon. The lineup of people they invited was great and I loved the commitment to a diverse group of junior R programmers. I really, really hope they run it again.

• Shoutout to rOpenSci from Hadley in an interview http://bulletin.imstat.org/2014/12/hadley-wickham-impact-the-world-by-being-useful/