The R Consortium, a nonprofit organized under the Linux Foundation with the mission to provide support for the R language, the R Foundation and the R Community, has recently completed its first year of operation. In this relatively short time, the R Consortium has already provided substantial funding for infrastructure related projects that are benefiting large portions of the R Community. These include the R-Hub build system, the effort to develop a unified distributed computing interface for R, the DBI project to improve database interfaces, the initiative to bring simple features to R, and more.
In this talk we will describe the mission and organization of the R Consortium, its rational for selecting projects and elaborate on the idea of an expanded sense of infrastructure that includes community projects, education and support for R user groups. We will also discuss how the data science fueled growth of the R language is likely to affect the R Consortium.
