1st CambR Meeting Minutes

[Laurent]

Dear all,

Last week, we had our first CambR User Group meeting (see picture -
http://goo.gl/p8SFE). Right off the bat we had a great turn out. We
welcomed a wide diversity of delegates from many University
departments, institutes and private companies, newcomeRs and
experienced R users and developers (for instance developers/
maintainers of the topGO, baySeq, BayesPeak, beadarray and
BeadDataPackR, rje and MSnbase packages), many bioinformaticians as
well as statisticians and people with interests in ecology or
linguistics.

The meeting started with a brief presentation by each delegate,
including slides by a few. We then shared some of our favourite
resources and R course in Cambridge, that will be summarised on our
web page (www.CambR.org.uk) soon.

The meeting went on with a discussion on CambR's future directions.
All people expressed their interest in repeating the experience. We
would be aiming for a meeting with 2-3 talks: possibly one 20 minute
talks on a R-related scientific topic and one or two 20 minute
technical or educational talks, focused on a specific R topics of
general interest. We already have volunteers to present topics like
'Optimisation in R', 'Package development' or 'Object-oriented
programming'. It was also suggested to possibly invite private
companies, located in the Cambridge area, that use R, as a way to
broaden the scope outside of academia. We agreed that we might want to
organise our next meeting in a pub, in the same spirit as the LondonR
meetings; the Fountain Inn, on Regent Street, that has a projector and
a separate room was suggested. We also discussed funding
opportunities: Revolution Analytics has a R user group sponsoring
scheme; some of us also discussed with Mango Solutions at the last
LondonR meeting. The agreed frequency for the meetings was every 3 to
4 months, which leads us to April/May, for a second CambR meeting. We
will aim for wider advertisement (on various mailing lists and
institutes and companies in the area) and broader impact on the local
R community.

Thank you again to all those that were able to make it.

Looking forward seeing you next time.

Laurent and Sven