Keywords: Government, Public Sector, Official Statistics
Webpages:
https://rdotgov.wordpress.com/ Over the last decade, government organisations around the world have increasingly adopted
R for their analytical needs, driven by the promise of more powerful and reproducible data analysis pipelines, Shiny - and lower costs.
R maturity varies considerably across the public sector, with some organisations just starting to experiment with
R, and others already using it as their primary workhorse for official statistics production and dissemination (Templ and Todorov 2016).
We will outline the main barriers to introducing
R in government organisations, from IT culture to the career progression of statisticians, and how the Scottish Government is overcoming them.
We will also present R.gov, an informal group open to all public sector organisations which aims to enable and promote the use of
R in government. The group already has members in ten countries, and provides a forum for sharing knowledge and fostering collaborations.
We hope this lightning talk will spark productive conversations and help create new connections, not just within government, but across the entire
R community.
References Templ, Matthias, and Valentin Todorov. 2016. “The Software Environment R for Official Statistics and Survey Methodology.”
Austrian Journal of Statistics 45: 97–124. doi:
10.17713/ajs.v45i1.100.
