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3rd Birthday of Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group

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This Thursday Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group (in polish Spotkania Entuzjastów R – SER – cheese) celebrated it’s 3rd birthday! Check this post to find out what we have prepared for this special occasion.

Summary of three years of the group activity

At the beggining of the meeting, the initiator of the Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group, Przemysław Biecek, gave a talk during which he summed up the last 3 years or our activities and presented main activities around R package in Poland in last several years. The presentation is available here. Attendees could learn some history of the R expansions in Poland and were introduced to R applications in Poland in fields like: insurances, technological industry, health service, weather forecasting.

If you haven’t had a chance to see that presentation, you might consider attending next (20th) Poznań R Users Group (PAZUR) meeting (23rd March), where Przemysław will show a similar talk.

This was the 24th gathering of our Warsaw R community. During those 3 years we grown so much that we exceeded 1300 users on our meetup group. Together we have had 44 presentations, 13 workshops, 2 data analysis hackathons, 1 meeting with a machine learning videos from youtube, we have supported the organization of the European R Users Meeting and we have started organizing Polish R Users Conference – Why R? 2017.

Toast

After the presentation we had a cake and the champagne. The toast for 3 consecutive years of successful meetings, raised more than 50 people. We even had the honor to host the representation of trigeR (TriCity R Enthusiasts Group), STWUR (Wroclaw R Users Association) and R-Ladies Warsaw Group (that are co-organized next to Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group).

Round tables session

Round table is a form of academic discussion. Participants agree on a specific topic to discuss and debate. Each person is given equal right to participate, as illustrated by the idea of a circular layout referred to in the term round table. – Wikipedia

As this is becoming more popular, we organized a round tables session with 6 various topics, including: R in education, R in business, Machine Learning, Shiny + Rmarkdown, R Freelancing, R integrations with other tools. Tables can be seen on this occasional photo of all attendees of the session. We planned a 1 hour long discussion but few tables lasted longer. Last attendees left the event almost 4 hours after we started the meeting.

WRUG baseball jackets

Yes! It’s not a coincidence that few people from a previous photo have the same outfit! For that occasion Alicja Gosiewska and Aleksandra Dąbrowska (our new co-organizers) prepared baseball jackets of Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group. So far 21 participants have ordered such gifts. I appealed this initiative so much that I have decided to subsidize those baseball jackets a bit.

wser.pl, a new logo and occasional stickers

We went even further, and created (with a help of Emil Buszyło) a new website of Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group (in polish: Warszawskie Spotkania Entuzjastów R (WSER)). It’s available here – wser.pl (still a little bit under construction). I am amazed by the timeline of our meetings. Baseball jackets, the website and occasional stickers were enriched by the new logo (by Klaudia Korniluk from Pędzlenie na zlecenie).

Acknowledgements

I would like to express a gratitude for Warsaw R Enthusiasts Group organizers: Przemysław Biecek for his ideas and passion; Olga Mierzwa-Sulima for her titanic work, business ideas and R-Ladies Warsaw initiative; Alicja Gosiewska and Aleksandra Dąbrowska for their huge support in the last few months; Natalia Potocka for the engagement in R-Ladies Warsaw.

Also I would like to thank eRka (Cracow R Users Group) for the exchange of experiences and ideas on how to properly organize an R meetup these days. Bartosz Sękiewicz, Zygmunt Zawadzki, Piotr Ocalewicz and Adam Wróbel – keep going guys with the good work you do for the Cracow R community.

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