It has been a momentous year for the R Consortium, and we are very grateful for the engagement and support we have received from our member sponsors and all the members of the R community.
76,048 members, 91 R User Groups, 39 countries, 6 continents
Our R User Groups program is better than ever! We helped to support a lot of you out there learning and sharing the R language. It is exciting to see this type of activity and we hope that in 2025, these groups will continue to grow and that we can sponsor new groups, too. We are always looking for more and better ways to support the community. We hope that you will let us know your suggestions for helping to grow the R community in your area.
Working Groups and Top-Level Projects delivering progress and access
Many of our working groups and projects had solid wins this year in pushing forward on their projects.
Our Submissions working group achieved its fourth successful submission with the FDA – the first to feature WebAssembly to bundle a Shiny application into a self-contained package.
We kicked off our Health Technology Assessment (HTA) working group with two workstreams (1. Stakeholder and landscape mapping and opportunity assessment & 2. R Tools for HTA – Identification, Curation, and Education) addressing issues in health technology evaluation and building a well-documented resource for robust R tools in HTA.
Multilingual R Documentation has published its first package rhelpi18n adding multilingual documentation support. This effort is a co-sponsored project with rOpenSci and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative’s Open Science Program,
We have added R-universe as a new Top-Level Project. R-universe provides a searchable catalog for R software, articles, datasets, anywhere in the ecosystem, and it is an open platform for running CRAN-like package repositories. We are thrilled to be working with rOpenSci on this important infrastructure project for the R community.
Quarto powered website
We must brag about our beautiful new Quarto-based website that we launched this year. Performance was increased by 65% faster overall, with homepage load times going from 2.3 seconds to 0.8 seconds on average in testing. The team did a wonderful job, and we invite the community to join us in contributing to the site. This is a great opportunity for first time contributors and for others to get a chance to work with a Quarto site.
Expanding support for the R language and infrastructure
The Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) funds two grant cycles per year for projects that support the development of the R language and the maintenance of its infrastructure. We funded 13 new projects in 2024. We have dispersed technical grants totaling almost $1.5 million since our founding. Our next grant cycle will re-open March 1, 2025, and now is a great time to contact the ISC to start the process.
Events IRL and digital were huge wins for all of us!
Live events are a great way to share new developments and raise awareness of what our community needs or wants. The R Consortium sponsored 12 events this year, and we are looking forward to seeing a lot of you next year at R/Medicine June 10-13 and useR! August 8-10. To access all the digital events and webinar content we produce, please subscribe to our YouTube channel so you are sure to get new videos as we post them.
New year, new opportunities and challenges
I encourage you to register for R/Medicine June 10-13 and SAVE THE DATE for useR! at Duke University August 8-10. We are looking forward to all the great programming in 2025 and would love to hear from the community any requests/ideas for content you would like to see.
Finally, our mission in support of the R language and its community is at the core of everything we do. This means we need to answer new challenges that face both. The recently passed Cyber Resilience Act will require CRAN and all community repositories to make changes to meet its requirements for distribution of packages in the EU. We are asking now for financial support to ensure that we, in coordination with the Linux Foundation, can assist all our repository maintainers to plan and work toward compliance by October of 2027.
To our current members, we thank you for your support and ask you to consider renewing your support at the next level.
If you're considering becoming a member-sponsor of the R Consortium, feel free to reach out to me (director at r-consortium dot org) or view the materials on our website.