How the R Consortium is Supporting the R Community
There is a lot happening at R Consortium! There are now 15 members, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation which joined this year as a Platinum member, 21 active projects and a fired- up grant process. This March the ISC awarded grants to 10 new projects totaling nearly $240,000. In this talk they describe how the R Consortium is evolving to carry out its mission to provide support for the R language, the R Foundation and the R Community
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Joseph Rickert from RStudio. And I am a director of the R Consortium. And I'm here with David Smith, my fellow director from Microsoft, who's also a director of the R Consortium. And what we'd like to do is give you some idea about the R Consortium and why we exist.
So first off, in simplest terms, the R Consortium is a group of business enterprises and philanthropic enterprises who have an interest in ensuring that the R language and the R community thrive for the long term. So the consortium is the vehicle for the participation of businesses in the R community.
The way I think about it is that to have a community like the R community, there are three necessary conditions. You have to have people who self-identify as part of the community, people who interact frequently, and there has to be a way for people to contribute to the community. So the R Consortium is a way for businesses to contribute to the community.
Membership and structure
And right now, what we have here is a list of the members. And what you see are the founding members, RStudio and Microsoft. And then on the end there, you see the addition this year of the Moore Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which I believe is a significant development because it shows that a well-established philanthropic grant-giving organization who's interested in promoting science and technology in the United States has recognized that R is a key contributor and enabler for the scientific community.
And on the bottom here, you see some organizations that are not directly making their business around the R language, like Google, for instance. Or you have here, this little mountain there is Ketchum Trading, which is a hedge fund in Chicago. These are smaller organizations who recognize that they have a significant dependence on the R language, and they want to become members of the community.
So here we have a way for businesses and other organizations to become a member. And we see ourselves as the link here. So the possibilities are that we could be the place that bind the community, which is at the people level, industry, which is a category above, collections of people, the R Foundation, which is, of course, an organization made up of people who are also individuals. So this is how we solve the, we see ourselves as a link.
Working groups and funded projects
Now, there are two major ways that we provide energy and money. So the energy part is exemplified by this slide here. We have the concept of working groups. And if you've ever worked in a standards organization, like the IEEE or other trade organizations, you can see that there's lots of opinions about how things should be done, right? And it's very important before you do anything to try to achieve consensus, perhaps get some funding to work out initial prototypes. And that's what the R Consortium Working Group is for.
So you see we have some already underway. And this graphic on the right here is, that's the reference architecture for the Distributed Computing Working Group. Now, what they're working on is to try to figure out if there is a single interface layer that, say, could be built that would be the proper way for people to write to if they were interested in using different distributed computing back end. So it's not an obvious solution. And they're working at it.
We see ourselves as a catalyst. We're delightful to see the success that Our Ladies is having. We funded Our Ladies during the last round last year, just a small amount of money. And we certainly can't take any kind of credit for the success. But this is a slide that they presented to us when we went through the exercise of seeing how our investments were turning out. And we're just delighted to see how much progress they've made and continue to make. And it's an example of sometimes you have something that's working at one level, and then maybe a little bit of money or attention. In this case, I think maybe just attention. And it works wonders.
A place where people can come together. So we mostly fund what we call infrastructure projects. But we have an extended idea of infrastructure. And getting people, small conferences and ways for people to meet are also part of our mission.
We're interested really in complicated projects. So when we go out for a call for papers, what we like to see are proposals from groups or individuals or groups of individuals who were willing to undertake something that will benefit a large portion of the art community and something big enough that it needs organizational help.
And then we're the resource for the heavy lifting. So the R-Hub project, which many of you have probably seen a tutorial on yesterday, was some kind of motivating project for the art consortium. What happens when you need to begin to put together the infrastructure for a modern day build system that will last through the 21st century?
Membership dues and financials
This is what it takes to be on the consortium. And it shows the commitment that these companies have made. So to be a platinum member, that's $100,000 dues per year. A gold member, which is underneath that, is $50,000. And the silver member is $25,000 for organizations that are over 100 people. What I'd like to see is the growth in the consortium with lots of smaller members contributing. Because we're all stronger when people become involved.
There's two major committees. You can see there's the board of directors that we're on. And that's involved with strategic decisions and how much money we have to spend. The infrastructure steering committee is the group that actually decides what projects get funded. And they issue the call for papers and what have you.
And this is a list of the active projects that are going now. You see, I'm up there on the board because I run our user group support program. So if you're organizing a user group, there is some money to be had depending on the size of the group. So please look at our consortium web page and write to us and tell us about your group.
And you see the grants range from small grants, you know, in the $5,000 range to the R-Hub is a significant project. So we're prepared to undertake real infrastructure. But our mission is to spread the money around. This is money that comes to us in dues. Right now, we're up to getting close to having handed out half a million dollars. And we're pretty efficient. I think the last I looked, our efficiency ratio is about 70%. And we'd like to even do better than that.
So the money comes in from the companies. They have an interest in fostering the community, the foundation, and the language. And we're trying to hand it back intelligently to people who have real contributions to make. So, David.
Microsoft's perspective on the R Consortium
Thank you, Jerry. I wanted to jump in at this point. If I turn it that way, it'll go forwards. I wanted to jump at this point and just give a little perspective from the point of view of Microsoft. And why did Microsoft become a member of the R Consortium?
And it has to do with what I said if you saw my talk this morning, is that the value of software, including R, lies not just in its technical capability, but also in the ecosystem that forms around it. And Microsoft has a lot of interest in R having a thriving ecosystem around it. You know, Microsoft is a fine and noble company, but it doesn't do things out of the goodness of its heart, should it have one. Microsoft is very selfishly investing in the R Consortium to foster the growth and success of the R community.
Microsoft is very selfishly investing in the R Consortium to foster the growth and success of the R community.
In its technical capabilities, to give you one very specific example, Microsoft has a very vested interest in R being able to access databases very well. And there is a DBI project that was funded by the R Consortium in order to unify the way that R connects with databases, which is very much in Microsoft's interests. It's also important from a talent perspective. Both we at Microsoft and our customers and partners that are working with R need to be able to hire people. And by investing in the R Consortium and being public about that, that helps us with our recruitment goals.
Also around the vendor network, you know, being able to work with the other vendors in the space, you know, like RStudio, like TIBCO, like everybody else, and have just unified discussions about how R is working in the commercial environment is very, very important to us at Microsoft. So from our perspective, we get very good value out of that $100,000 a year that we invest in the R Consortium, which in turn gets invested into the broader ecosystem as Joe just described.
Just to give some summaries about the R Consortium since it's been running for a couple of years now, we currently do have 13 members, four of which are that top level platinum member, actually, rather than gold as listed there. We would love to have more. So if you are working at an organization which is doing a lot with R, please do talk to your leadership about potentially becoming a member of the R Consortium, and in turn, contributing to the ecosystem in the ways that I just described.
But the thing that I think I'm most personally proud of as a founding member, and I'm sure the other members are as well, is the projects that the members of the community have been able to undertake through the R Consortium sponsorship, and not just the projects, but also the working groups and the social organizations that Joe mentioned as well.
Another thing that I think is really, really important that the R Consortium has achieved is to open up a conduit between the vendor community that is working with Microsoft and directly with the leadership of the R Foundation. One of the ways the governance structure of the R Consortium is designed is that the R Foundation automatically has a seat on the board, participates in the board meetings, participates in the discussions, and that has really improved the communication back and forth between the vendor community and the R core group. Right now, Robert Gentleman is representing the R Foundation on the board of the R Consortium.
And in general, it's just providing a secure, long-term foundation for R as a whole, R as an ecosystem from these vested interests of the vendors that are working around R.
What's coming up
So what's coming up? One of the projects that the R Consortium is investing in right now and undertaking is a general survey of the R community. This is essentially an academic survey. It's been designed. We spent a working group, spent about three months designing this survey. It's only recently been launched, but we would love to hear from you and any member of the R community broadly that might be watching online or anybody who is using R to provide information about what you think about the past, present, and future of the R project.
There'll be a link at the end of the presentation, but please do visit the R Consortium blog or the R Consortium Twitter handle to see a link to that survey. There are also a number of new projects that have already been funded and are kicking off soon. If you'd like to read about those new projects, that's on the R Consortium blog at the link there. And if you have been inspired by projects that you and some colleagues might wish to undertake, there will be a new round of proposals being announced later on this year where you can make an application and apply for funding in the same way we saw.
So just in general, to wrap up, the R Consortium is there to promote the growth and development of R as a leading platform for data science, to provide support directly to the R Foundation through that connection I mentioned a moment ago, to fund projects that are supporting the R project and the R community, and foster the growth of that R community. And then from the point of view of the vendors, to help enable the use of R in commercial environments and foster collaboration between those companies that are using R in that commercial sector.
So, as I mentioned earlier on, help us to help you be part of that community. Please talk to your company about potentially becoming a member. Think about projects and submit them to the R Consortium when the new round comes out shortly. Have a look at the existing projects that are currently underway, and if you'd like to chip in and help with those, please do. And follow us and spread the word on Twitter and at the blog. Thank you very much.