My team at Lander Analytics has been putting together conferences for six years, and they’ve always had the same fun format, which the community has really enjoyed. There’s the NYR conference for New Yorkers and those who want to fly, drive or train to join the New York community, and there’s DCR, which gathers the DC-area community. The last DCR Conference at Georgetown University went really well, as you can see in this recap. With the shift to virtual gatherings brought on by the pandemic, our community has gone fully remote, including the monthly Open Statistical Programming Meetup. With that, we realized the DCR Conference didn’t just need to be for folks from the DC-area anymore, instead, we could welcome a global audience like we did with this year’s NYR. And that gave birth to R|Gov, the Government and Public Sector R Conference.

R|Gov is really a new industry-focused conference. Instead of drawing on speakers from a particular city or area, the talks will focus on work done in specific fields. In this case, in government, defense, NGOs and the public sector, and we have speakers from not only the DC-area, but also from Geneva, Switzerland, Nashville, Tennessee, Quebec, Canada and Los Angeles, California. For the last three years, we have been working with Data Community DC, R-Ladies DC, and the Statistical Programming DC Meetup, to put on DCR, and continue to do so for R|Gov as we find great speakers and organizations who want to collaborate in driving attendance and building the community.

Like NYR and DCR, the topics at R|Gov  range from practical how-tos, to theoretical findings, to processes, to tooling and the speakers this year come from the Center for Army Analysis, NASA, Columbia University, The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Inter-American Development Bank, The United States Census Bureau, Harvard Business School, In-Q-Tel, Virginia Tech, Deloitte, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Georgetown University, among others. We will also be hosting two rum and gin master classes, including one with Mount Gay, which comes from the oldest continuously running rum distillery in the world, and which George Washington served at his inauguration!

The R Conference series is quite a bit different from other industry and academic conferences.  The talks are twenty minutes long with no audience questions with the exception of special talks from the likes of Andrew Gelman or Hadley Wickham. Whether in person or virtual, we play music, have prize giveaways and involve food in the programming. When they were in person, we prided ourselves on avocado toast, pizza, ice cream and beer. For prizewinners, we autographed books right on stage since the authors were either speakers or in the audience. With the virtual events we try to capture as much of that spirit as possible, and the community really enjoyed the virtual R Conference | NY in August. A very lively event remotely and in the flesh, it is also one of the more informative conferences I have ever seen.

This virtual conference will include much of the in-person format, just recreated virtually. We will have 24 talks, a panel, workshops, community and networking breaks, happy hours, prizes and giveaways, a Twitter Contest, Meet the Speaker series, Job Board access, and participation in the Art Auction. We hope to see you there December 2-4, on a comfy couch near you.

Contact my team if you would like to sponsor. To learn more about the speaker lineup, workshops, and agenda visit rstats.ai/gov and landeranalytics.com. Join our slack team and follow us at @rstatsdc and @landeranalytics.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

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