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Continuing to Grow Community Together at ozunconf, 2018

In late November 2018, we ran the third annual rOpenSci ozunconf. This is the sibling rOpenSci unconference, held in Australia. We ran the first ozunconf in Brisbane in 2016, and the second in Melbourne in 2017. Photos taken by Ajay from Fotoholics As usual, before the unconf, we started discussion on GitHub issue threads, and the excitement was building with the number of issues. The day before the unconf we ran “Day 0 training” - an afternoon explaining R packages and GitHub....

rcites - The story behind the package

The Ecology Hackathon Almost one year ago now, ecologists filled a room for the “Ecology Hackathon: Developing R Packages for Accessing, Synthesizing and Analyzing Ecological Data” that was co-organised by rOpenSci Fellow, Nick Golding and Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This hackathon was part of the “Ecology Across Borders” Joint Annual Meeting 2017 of BES, GfÖ, NecoV, and EEF in Ghent. At different tables, different people joined each other to work on different ideas to implement as R packages....

Generating reasonable starting trees for complex phylogenetic analyses

I never really thought I would write an R package. I use R pretty casually. Then, this year, I was invited to participate during the last week of the Analytical Paleobiology short course, an intensive month-long experience in quantitative paleontology. I was thrilled to be invited. But I got a slight sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized all the materials were in R. And so I, a Pythonista, decided I would spend some of my maternity leave writing R packages to try to blend in with students who had spent the month living and breathing R....

Community Call - Governance strategies for open source research software projects

🎤 Dan Sholler, rOpenSci Postdoctoral Fellow 🕘 Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 10-11AM PST; 7-8PM CET (find your timezone) ☎️ Details for joining the Community Call. Everyone is welcome. No RSVP needed. Researchers use open source software for the capabilities it provides, such as streamlined data access and analysis and interoperability with other pieces of the scientific computing ecosystem. For most complex software, generating these technical capabilities requires building and governing a community via sound management practices, activities that are often less visible than code contributions and other software development work....

Detecting spatiotemporal groups in relocation data with spatsoc

spatsoc is an R package written by Alec Robitaille, Quinn Webber and Eric Vander Wal of the Wildlife Evolutionary Ecology Lab (WEEL) at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It is the lab’s first R package and was recently accepted through the rOpenSci onboarding process with a big thanks to reviewers Priscilla Minotti and Filipe Teixeira, and editor Lincoln Mullen. spatsoc started as a single function (what would eventually become group_pts) written by Alec in 2017 to help answer some of the questions that Quinn and Eric were asking about how animal social structure is related to spatial processes....

Working together to push science forward

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