R Community in Australia

September 17, 2009

(This article was first published on Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

One of the nice aspects of R is the community of users that has built up around it. The open-source model seems to create an orientation of sharing and contribution. Users benefit from R and then they give back in the form of new packages, free documentation, blogs, presentations, and so on.

I noticed how Revolutions has a listing of R User Groups. I also noticed when I attended the 2009 DSC (see John Maindonald's comments) that there were R communities in Europe and North America. This post presents a list of R activity in Australia. I'm a relative newbie to the R-world, so this is a tentative list of R in Oz. Perhaps I'll add to it from time to time. Feel free to post additions, if you are an R user in Australia, or if you can think of people, groups, and sites that I've left off.

An incomplete list of People using R, Sites, and Groups in Australia.

R Down Under (i.e., New Zealand and Australia) mailing list and archives.
Bill Venables has written books on R and Introduction to R.
John Maindonald: I attended the 2008 workshop he put on about R and it was well attended. His book is also particularly good: Data Analysis and Graphics Using R: An Example-based Approach.
There's a Canberra R Users Group.
The folks behind Introduction to Scientific Programming and Simulation Using R appear to be Melbourne based.
Although he's not currently based in Australia, David from Revolutions has an Australian connection.
Murray Aitkin and others just released a book called Statistical Modelling in R.
The team who developed the data mining application Rattle are based in Australia. Last I heard Rattle was being used a lot in the Australian Tax Office.
Rob Hyndman: He presented at the 2008 R workshop on time-series modelling. He also has books, packages, and a blog with occasional posts on R.
An assortment of other people who discuss R on their website include: Simon Blomberg; UWA Cognitive Science Lab;
There's a list of contributors by country including Australia.