This is a guest post by my colleague Professor Di Cook, cross-posted from her Visiphilia blog. Di and I are two of the authors of the new eechidna package for R, now on CRAN.The eechidna package has just been posted on CRAN, in time for the longest election campaign in Australia since the 1950s. The next Federal election scheduled for 2nd July was announced a few weeks ago. A little before this a handful of academics met at the first ever Australian ROpenSci Unnconference at the Microsoft headquarters in Brisbane in an event primarily organised by students at the Queensland University of Technology.