First meetup of the Trento R User Group, North Italy

Our brand-new R User Group has met at Simposio Bar in Trento, Italy! The meetup started at 7pm and everything went smooth and fine.

With Daniele and Emanuele, we  founded the group on the 9th of May and our community grew quickly: now it counts 37 members.

I  met Leonardo, Francesca, Fulvio, Daniele, Emanuele, Giambattista, Giacomo, Alessio, Vittorio and some of them for the very first time. We are an interactive and  etherogeneous group of 5 engineers, 2 agronomists, 1 physic, 1 bioinformatician and (yeah!) 1 statistician!

We talked mainly about the organization of the User Group: we found a few candidate places for our next meetups (with a beamer and the free network connection) and we decided to schedule a meetup every month (more or less).

Then we tried to figure out how to get in touch with the other existing Free and Open Source Software groups in our area to join the efforts in promoting FOSS and R.

Then we moved on some ideas for some tutorials for sharing our knowledge with each other. The hot topics will be R vs Python, how to organize an R script and publish it as a package, and a crash course on Shiny.

A seminal idea for a R package for the exploitation of the local Open Data has been proposed by Giacomo and I am willing to help him. I'll write about it in the next posts.

Trento R User Group: the first meetup in its full glory. 

If you wonder where Trento is placed on this planet, let's put R at work! Here's the code:

library(ggmap) 
 
simposioBar = c(11.1193,46.0680)
 
map = get_map(location= simposioBar, source= "stamen", maptype= "watercolor",crop=FALSE)
 
g = ggmap(map) + theme_void() + geom_point(data= data.frame(lon= simposioBar[1], lat= simposioBar[2]), size= 3, shape= 21, fill= "darkred", colour= "white" )) 

So, if you guessed right, we're just in the middle of the Alps! If you want more details, you can just play around the get_map() command!

location of the Trento R User group (made with ggmap)

A new italian User's group is born: welcome to the Trento RUG!

With Daniele and Emanuele, I started  a new R User Group in Trentino, north of Italy.
We have been thinking to open a RUG for a while: after giving it some thoughts we just started it with the hope to collect a lot of users to share knowledge and experience.

In the area were we live there are one University and two big private Research Centers with lots of new start-ups: we believe that a wide user base is potentially present in the Trento area. In fact in just two days (*bang!*) our RUG has already registered ten useRs!

So, if you are a useR and live near us,  just jump on board and register to  www.meetup.com/Trento-R-Users-Group
Our first meetup will be on Tue, May 31th just to get in touch and start together this adventure.