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R Conference Events Explorer

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Anushka7310 edited this page Apr 19, 2021 · 10 revisions

Background

The R language has a very large, active, and diverse global community that is the core of its ecosystem. Community engagement is an important way of fortifying the long-term stability of an open-source community. Events have become a standard way of keeping members of a geographically dispersed open-source community, engaged. A geographical diffusion of R events appears to be a significant way of attracting more R users, inspiring new user groups, increasing participation, search engine and social media activity, contributions, diversity and general expansion of the R ecosystem. But how can this diffusion and the state of R be measured over time? How can R-focused organizations track events/user-groups activity to plan future events or diversity packages for regional or global events?

Events in the R community are grouped around: Meetups, satRdays, useR!, unconferences, local/regional conferences, etc The current challenge is that there is no centralized place to find the many events happening around the world. With most events going virtual these days, having a central tool to track them all would be potentially useful to groups, organizations, individuals in terms of planning and avoiding coincidence. It would be difficult to understand the global growth or decline in events without such a tool.

Furthermore, in the planning and operation of both large and small events, historical data is key. Having a way to explore (filter, sort, visualize, etc) historical data like: list of sponsors and the type of events they have sponsored, list of keynote/invited speakers and when/where they spoke, event fees, in addition to grouping these by region would be helpful to organizers in planning future events.

Related work

R Community Explorer has started up a central automated R Calendar: https://r-community.github.io/event-explorer/rcalendar.html However, this is not sufficient. Visualizing events on a world map, stats on global and regional events, and by event type, trends and analysis on event topics to see trending topics are still missing. More so, an infrastructure that allows organizers add their events to a central resource from which activity on their events can be tracked and reported on a global dashboard is not yet available.

Details of your coding project

1a. Where the student is not able, we can provide Meetup data for as long as possible. The student will visualize upcoming events in a leaflet map as seen in other R Community Explorer dashboards and filling the marker popups with vital information and build a flexdashboard similar to R Community Explorer user groups dashboard.

1b. Once the above is ready, we will replicate the dashboard above using another dataset for past Meetup events.

  1. We have curated data on past satRdays events, including speakers, sponsors and fees. Update this data and visualize using flexdashboard.

  2. Log and visualize R conference/events tweets (#useR2021, #erum2021, #rstudioconf, #latinR, etc) in a central flexdashboard.

  3. Setup pipelines using CI/CD (e.g. GitHub Actions) to facilitate the ETL of related data daily.

  4. Restyling of the resulting flexdashboard dashboards using CSS.

Skills

R, JavaScript

Expected impact

This project has the potential to become a central tool for exploring past and future events globally and regionally. Many organizers who are looking for sponsors, event ideas, and speakers could have this tool as a starting point.

Planning diversity packages require data. This tool proposes to provide a global reporting on the state of R events. Recognize the efforts of regional organizers who spend a lot of time and effort with events.

This project hopes to build the framework for monitoring the popularity of R-related events and understanding the interests of the global R community over time by tracking event topics/content.

Mentors

EVALUATING MENTOR: Ben Ubah ([email protected]) is the primary maintainer of R Community Explorer, an R package author, GCI mentor and has prior GSoC experience. He is part of the global organizing committee (Technology) for useR! 2021

SECOND MENTOR: Rick Pack ([email protected]) is a contributor to R Community Explorer, past mentor for this project and a data scientist at LabCorp.

BACKUP MENTOR: Gergely Daroczi [email protected] is the author of eg pander, botor and logger packages. He is a Director of Data Ops at System1, and the organizer of the Budapest Users of R Network, the first satRday conference, and the European R Users Meeting 2018.

Tests

  1. Use this data (https://github.com/benubah/r-community-explorer/blob/master/docs/R_Events.rds) to create a simple flexdashboard

  2. Add interactivity using the crosstalk package - update the flexdashboard in (1) above. You can get ideas from this blog post: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2021/03/servershiny-less-dashboards-with-r-htmlwidgets-and-crosstalk/

Solutions of tests

Students, please write your name here, and send a link to your solution via email to avoid plagiarism.

  1. Name - Anushka Gupta- Tests Solutions
  2. Name - Meet Bhatnagar - Tests Solutions
  3. Name - Aman Bhatt - Tests Solutions

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