Today I participated in the first meeting of the #rstats RConsortium working group for R repositories. The path I started on with cranchange lead me to this point, although this group has a much larger scope.

On the CRAN side of things I was encouraged to hear from Michael Lawrence that there is a desire to make change at CRAN including plans create a more informative public web presence, and bring on someone in a Developer Advocate role(!).

One thing I think that is going to be key to positive change is eliciting some clearer sense from CRAN as to what the group’s goals and priories are. For example: What priority is placed on being a Continuous Integration service for R-Core vs a validation and distribution mechanism for a rolling release of R packages?

I have a hunch that some of the inconsistency R users and developers see is due to tension between these types of objectives, but I am keen to learn more from this group.

I am very thankful to the Linux Foundation and RConsortium for facilitating this group, especially Joseph Rickert for leading.

Hadley Wickham’s meeting minutes are accessible from the repository