• A discussion group centered around the use of R in geography
• A place to come for assistance with problems in coding, visualizing and generally working with R
• A forum to show off some of the cool stuff you have been doing
• A place to find out about the R functions that you didn't know about

• A class: no assignments, assessments, etc
• No credit either…

• Not at all!
• Just need to have some interest in using it (or potentially using it)

• Every Wednesday through the semester: 2-3 pm
• The suggested schedule will be to alternate between open sessions for problem solving and presentations
• How to structure the problem solving sessions?
  • One-to-one, 'genius'/'imbecile' bar, presentations of problems to the group?
• Presentations can be anything: a new package, a new analysis, a new figure
  • But the presenter should provide some example code that the group can look at

• Name for the group
• Group structure
• Ideas for the group
• Listserv / group page
• Slack channel

• Wednesday (04/10): a quick look at markdown and/or Github for sharing code (Simon)
• Wednesday (04/17): Species distribution models? (Lila)

• Version control system
• Manages a set of files in a repository
• Provides simple method for incremental backups
• System for collaboration and communication
• Tools for updating, tracking changes, bug notification and tracking, …

• GitHub provides a hosting service for your repository (others include Bitbucket and Gitlab)
• Provides a frontend to your project as well as a cloud-based backup
• Makes it easy to share code (and retrieve your own code if your local copy is not working)
• Used for the development of lots of R packages - you can use it to develop your own package
• Often used as a way to show your portfolio of projects and code

To get R/Rstudio talking to GitHub you will need to do the following:

• Create a github account (it's free…)
• Install/upgrade R and RStudio
• Install git
• Setup GitHub
• Connect R to GitHub