by Joseph Rickert
Early on, Revolution Analytics realized that R is more than just a tool for statistical computing — it is also the culture that has grown up around the use of the tool. The R culture is open and inclusive, competitive but also nourishing. There is a strong sense of community that encourages contribution and growth. We very much value R’s culture and community and we are doing our best to contribute. At UserR 2013 we displayed a poster that highlights some of our contributions.
Revolution Analytics sponsors R themed conferences such as useR! and we provide financial support to local R user groups around the world. We believe in the “live event” and face-to-face encounters. We think that the personal bonds that are forged at these meetings are a great strength of R. In addition to providing a sense of occasion, they make possible the chance meeting, the serendipitous exchange of ideas, and occasionally the opportunity for a kind word to encourage an R beginner.
On a daily basis we do our best to keep these relationships alive, by listing R user groups on our website, tracking community events, reporting on new developments and recognizing accomplishments in our blog.
We also look outward from the R community to the world of business, finance, industry and government and promote the use of R for analytics and data analyses of all kinds. We are R evangelists and work hard to explain and promote open source R to the press, to social media and to the general population. We do our best to present R, and the R community in a way that we hope all R developers and contributors will be pleased with.
Finally, we look for ways to make technical contributions to R itself. Revolution developers have authored and continue to maintain a number of open-source parallel computing packages on CRAN. More recently, we have funded early stage R research, such as the beginning work on bigvis, and the RHadoop project which we hope will help to help establish R as a fundamental component of “Big Data” analytics.
We would very much like to hear your ideas about how you think Revolution Analytics might continue contribute to the R community in the future — let us know your thoughts in the comments.
If you truly believe in what you are saying, then open source RevoScaleR, XDF etc so that the R community can benefit from this work as much as you have benefited from the R community. Blogging and sponsoring groups is ok...but it doesn’t really make for healthy open source support; releasing code to GPL does.
Posted by: catsmth | July 25, 2013 at 18:05
@catsmth, we have contributed quite a lot of open-source projects to the community: several CRAN packages, the RHadoop project, networkspaces, to name just a few. Not everything we do is open-source, it's true, but you can expect our open source contributions to continue in the future.
Posted by: David Smith | July 26, 2013 at 13:18