rOpenSci specializes in creating R libraries for accessing data resources on the web from R. Most times you request data from the web in R with our packages, you should have no problem. However, you evenutally will run into problems. In addition, there are advanced things you can do modifying requests to web resources that fall in the advanced stuff category.

Key to the success of rOpenSci is our community and we want to hear more regularly from our members, and foster new interactions among the group. In addition, community calls are a way for us to give important updates, and get feedback on them. We tentatively plan on doing community calls once per month. The format of rOpenSci community calls could be of various types.

Why open data growth At rOpenSci we try to make it easier for people to use open data and contribute open data to the community. The question often arises: How much open data do we have? Another angle on this topic is: How much is open data growing? We provide access to dozens of data respositories through our various packages.

So what is Docker? Docker is a relatively new opensource applicationand service, which is seeing interest across a number of areas. Ituses recent Linux kernel features (containers, namespaces) to shieldprocesses.

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.

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 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 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.

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

We’re delighted to be sponsoring the upcoming Open Science Codefest in Santa Barbara, California, alongside RENCI, NCEAS, NSF, DataONE, and Mozilla Science Lab. The Open Science Codefest’s goal is to gather researchers from across ecology, biodiversity science, and other earth and environmental sciences with programmer types to collaborate on coding projects.

We just released v0.2 of rnoaa. For details on the update, see the release notes. What follows are some notes on the more important changes.