[R] Reasons to Use R in a Public Administrations and Ideas for a Short Training

[Thierry Onkelinx]

Dear Lorenzo,

First of all I would focus on topics which immediately usable by your
audience. E.g. making figures and tables based on preprocessed data
files (txt, Excel, GoogleSheets, data base query, ...). And pick
examples in which the definition of the figures and tables remains
more or less stable but the data is updated with some frequency. In a
next step you could focus on processing the data.

I would even skip the step of writing R scripts and start with basic R
notebooks. The ability to include both plain text and code into one
source document is very useful for repetitive tasks. And you
significantly reduce the need to copy/paste results.

Think about a list of packages which you can recommend to your
audience. I would consider the tidyverse collection.

Best regards,



ir. Thierry Onkelinx
Statisticus / Statistician

Vlaamse Overheid / Government of Flanders
INSTITUUT VOOR NATUUR- EN BOSONDERZOEK / RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR NATURE
AND FOREST
Team Biometrie & Kwaliteitszorg / Team Biometrics & Quality Assurance
thierry.onkelinx using inbo.be
Havenlaan 88 bus 73, 1000 Brussel
www.inbo.be

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no
more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be
able to say what the experiment died of. ~ Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
The plural of anecdote is not data. ~ Roger Brinner
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does
not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body
of data. ~ John Tukey
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////




2018-04-18 15:47 GMT+02:00 Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella using gmail.com>:
> Dear All,
> Ages ago I posted to this mailing list asking for advice about to
> evangelize the use of R in an international public
> administration where the fact that R is free is not a decisive factor
> (actually its being "freeware" may even be seen negatively). After a
> long time, I think it is worthwhile asking the question again and see
> what suggestions other users have.
>
> Another question related to that: let's say you have the possibility
> to give a short course (most likely short of 10 hours) to people
> who are not trained in statistics (people with a background in
> international relations or political scientists frustrated at Excel
> and who sometimes have to do a number of repetitive tasks). How would
> you formulate a short training to make them not R proficient users,
> but aware and looking forward to learning more about R?
> Any suggestion and/or pointer to online resources is appreciated.
> Many thanks
>
> Lorenzo
>
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