Please how do you classify R User Groups on meetup.com? DO you select any groups that mention R (or r-programming or r-project) in their topic list but have other programming languages in their topic list? Or do you select groups that are focused on R language alone?
Also, while querying the meetup API, what query is used to select those groups you have identified as R user groups?.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Ben
Hi @benubah! Could you please provide some more context on what you are trying to accomplish? Are you trying to find a local meetup to attend? Or are you trying to gather information on all the existing R user groups?
I don't think there is any official designation for an R User Group. In other words, anyone can form a group to chat about R! 
The R Consortium funds user groups through its User Group Program, so one option would be to search meetup.com for "r consortium". Another option would be to search for commonly used tags such as Programming in R, R Language, or R Project for Statistical Computing.
Great response @jdblischak,
I wish the maintainers of the Events category could also respond, as I guess they automatically query the meetup API to post weekly reports of upcoming R User Group events .
We are trying to build a data-driven explorer for R user groups by querying the meetup API, so we really need the best way to classify an R User Group.
There are groups that mention all of Python, Julia, Data Science, and R-Project for Statistical Computing as their topics; could these be called R user groups? When you query the meetup API with a search text of "r-project-for-statistical-computing", they show up!
So how does one classify an R User Group from meetup.com?
Hi @benubah!
You're right, @EconomiCurtis used the meetup API to create a parameterized R Markdown document that I use when posting the events. He pulls out the events that have terms such as "r-user", "r-shiny", "r-ladies", etc. but sometimes we miss a few and add these groups in separately when people let us know. I'll let @EconomiCurtis weigh in as to exactly how this is done. We like to include the more general Data Science Groups on the list as well as they sometimes have presentations on R, but are not focused on the R language alone. Appreciate any feedback you have too!
Thanks @rachael !
I have a better understanding now from your response. I see that @EconomiCurtis is pulling out events and not user groups. The context quite differs, but this offers another idea on how to find groups using event topics. Perhaps we could be tilting from just core R user groups to Data Science Groups that list R Language as one of their topics/focus. Reason is that: core R user groups also list other topics/focuses such as "Predictive Analytics", "Data science", "Machine Learning", "Statistical Analysis", etc in addition to "Programming in R".
Glad to hear from @EconomiCurtis any time.
If you'd like to see what we're working on , I'd be glad to share it off this list for now.
Many thanks!
Ahoy all,
Your project sounds awesome! I'd love to contribute. Do you happen to have an open repo or regular meeting we might join?
And yes, we use R-Ladies' excellent meetupr package to query meetup for these groups and events. We first use find_groups to find groups that mention r-ladies, r-user, R-Shiny, pydata. Jupyter, Bioconductor, or Data Science. After that, we query all events for these groups, and then filter out all those false positives (by string detection of urlname and groupname).
This generates a report that @rachael and I look at each week, and further screen out events that aren't obvious R-user groups or R-focused events.
We haven't found an easy way to get R-user groups other than lots of string matching, guess and checking, and responding to peoples messages of "why isn't my event on your list?".
Occationally, I go over Jumping Rivers' and the R-Consotium's R-Users Groups Database (RUGS Worldwide) (you might need to get permission to view this) lists to see if we missed anything.
What's not included?
The trickiest thing has been getting data from groups that don't use meetup. In that review of groups we are missing, I encourage groups that aren't on meetup to join the R-Consortium R User Group meetup.com Pro Program, which will sponsor your pro meetup.com subscription. Some have apis you can call, but many just aren't included in our report.
You should be aware that there are many many organization and university R-user groups that are not open to the public. Although we try to be aware of those groups we don't list them here.
Going forward we plan to develop the discourse Events plugin to offer a searchable and filterable calendar. Once that's up and running, we'd have an RSS feed you could call with each post an individual event (but it's not something you can work today).
We're also looking to better include non-IRL events like rOpenSci's excellent community call series.
Great response @EconomiCurtis !,
Thank you for the detailed response! I understand clearly now how you compile this list.
Will be glad to learn from your code if possible - perhaps see how you screen out some events/groups. My work is time-constrained and I am supposed to clear this by next week.
I'm also using the meetupr package for this, though we're trying to improve it to be able to do more because of our work. This is in progress through several pull requests that are currently reviewed.
I have been thinking of a unified calendar of events since last year - glad you doing something in this direction. Perhaps we could discuss this later on.
I have shared the repo information with you and @rachael.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thank you!
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