Hello world !

This is to announce the rOpenGov project and encourage new contributions to promote community-driven development of R tools for open government data and computational social science.

A community of independent package developers around open goverment data analytics is now emerging at rOpenGov. Independent projects dedicated to US, Russia, Finland, Poland, Austria, and OpenStreetMap have already joined in; more are coming and we will keep you posted through this blog.

The rapidly emerging governmental and other open data streams provide novel opportunities for social sciences, data journalism, and citizen participation across the globe while computational tools to utilize these resources are lacking. A community-driven software ecosystem provides a scalable solution and a potential to revolutionize the field, taking advantage of the lessons learned in Bioconductor, rOpenSci, and related projects. The umbrella site focusing on open government data R tools will give added visibility and recognition for independent package developers, an opportunity to attract contributors, and a forum for exchanging ideas and information.

The project is in beta, and more information will be added soon. You can follow us on rOpenGov blog, Twitter, Google+, and IRC (ropengov@Freenode). If you are working on related projects, don’t hesitate to get in touch!