R Flashmob

Dan Goldstein, Michael E. Driscoll, and JD Long write:

We’re organizing an “R Flashmob” to get students and researchers asking and answering R questions on the very useful questions site “stackoverflow.com” during one fun-filled hour.

We were wondering if you might help out in promoting this event by blogging something about it and/or emailing it to students or researchers who would benefit by having a friendly, efficient resource for asking and answering R questions. It would be great if you could!

Stackoverflow was built specifically for handling programming questions. It’s a better mousetrap. It offers search (and is well indexed by search engines), tagging, voting, the ability to choose the “best” answer to a question, and the ability to edit questions and answers as technology progresses. It has a karma system to reward people who are happy to help and discourage MLJs (mailing list jerks).

The organizers of this MOB have no commercial interest in stackoverflow. They’re just convinced it is the best way to help and promote R. All the content submitted to stackoverflow is protected by a Creative Commons CC-Wiki License, meaning anyone is free to copy, distribute, transmit, and remix the information on stackoverflow. All the content on stackoverflow is regularly made available for download by the public.

INSTRUCTIONS – R MOB #2

Location: stackoverflow.com

Start Date: Tuesday, September 8th, 2009, 1:04pm U.S. eastern time

More information here.

2 thoughts on “R Flashmob

  1. Thanks for the link! We're really looking forward to increasing R participation over at Stack Overflow.

    There are also a number of Twitter users who periodically tweet about R using the keyword #rstats. There are also a number of people in Twitter substituting the letter 'r' in place of the verb 'are'… don't ask them questions about how to use the apply() functions or the difference between [] and [[]].

    -JD Long

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