I’m very pleased to announce that rOpenSci has signed a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship agreement with the NumFocus foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that supports R&D for open source scientific software projects. We are delighted to be in the company of esteemed projects such as IPython and Julia that share our goal of promoting reproducible research practices across many scientific communities and developing a rich ecosystem of tools for open scientific computing.

All of our activities, from hackathons and the ambassador program to salaries for our full-time personnel, are 100% grant supported at this time. While we will continue to pursue all possible federal and private funding to support future efforts, our continued success necessitates a diverse funding model. Given the current funding climate additional donations from individuals, institutions, and corporations are critical to help us remain sustainable and give us the ability to scale.

• funding

The week after labor day, we had the pleasure of attending the NCEAS open science codefest event in Santa Barbara. It was great to meet folks like the new arrivals at the expanding Mozilla Science Lab, Bill Mills and Abby Cabunoc (Bill even already has a great post up about the codefest), and see old friends from NCEAS and DataONE, among many more. This 2.5 day event ran smoothly thanks to the leadership of Matt Jones. The event was run in unconference style. Each idea was then posted up on a giant post it on the wall and people had 30 minutes to wander the room choosing projects. The approach allowed for a consensus based filtering of ideas. We had the opportunity to suggest some ideas, and a chance to help out with others. Here’s an overview of the projects the rOpenSci team worked on and what we accomplished at the open science codefest....

• conference

The Open Tree of Life project aims to synthesize our combined knowledge of how organisms relate to each other, and make the results available to anyone who wants to use them. At present, the project contains data from more than 4,000 published phylogenies, which combine with other data sources to make a tree that covers 2.5 million species.

In September, the Open Tree of Life team are holding a hackathon to develop tools that use the project’s web services to extract, annotate and add data. We are excited to say that Francois Michonneau and I will be attending the hackathon, where they plan to work with Joseph W. Brown on an R package that allows users to interact with the Open Tree data.

• conference

In the last 12 months we traveled all over the world delivering talks and hands on workshops at various conferences and universities. This was a great opportunity for us to raise awareness for the project and get more of you involved as contributors and collaborators. As we scale the project to the next level, we need your help in spreading the message.

Today we would like to officially announce the rOpenSci Ambassadors program. To facilitate more discussion about rOpenSci tools and projects, we like to support our community members in running small workshops (perhaps a lunch time event), talks (lightning or longer talk at the next conference you attend), hands on tutorials (for your grad department, seminar), or similar event.

• community

UPDATE: Use the new discussion forum at https://discuss.ropensci.org/

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Community

Community is at the heart of rOpenSci. We couldn’t have accomplished most of our work without help from various contributors and users.

Most of our discussions with the broader community over the past year have been through twitter or one-on-one conversations. However, we would like to foster more open ended and deeper discussions with our community. To this end, we are resurrecting our public Google group list. We encourage you to sign up and post ideas for packages, solicit feedback on new ideas, and most importantly find other collaborators who share your domain interests. We also plan to use the list to solicit feedback on some of the bigger rOpenSci projects early on in the development phase allowing our community to shape future direction and also collaborate where appropriate.

• community