JBR_notes_8-30-18_meeting

Minutes of 8/30/18 Meeting
Cesnsus working Group Meeting
Notes by JBR
Attendees:
Ari Lamstein
Alexandra Barker (alexandra.s.barker@census.gov)
Joseph Rickert

Jeffrey Meisel has left the Census Bureau and has withdrawn from the working group.

Alexandra Barker from Census has joined the group. Alexandra expects that the first R-based training course on using a Census survey data set will go online within a month. The course will be addressed to people who are new to both R and the Census data and will take approximately four hours to work through.  The Census Academy will launch two months after the course is released.

After the course is available, the working group will write an R Consortium Blog post.
Ari also expects to make progress on his ISC project to populate the RC/Census GitHub site with information and recommendations about R packages and resources for analyzing Census data.

The group spent some time discussing what the call to action should be in the planned post. The initial call might be a modest request to have people examine the training course and make suggestions for additional information that could be provided. 

Future steps might include a webinar or series of webinars that assume the basic knowledge provided in the course and more ambitious projects including a contest where R community members would analyze a Census data set.

The group also spent time discussing what groups are likely to find the Census data and R resources particularly helpful. Economists, political scientists, marketing people and journalists headed the list. Alexandra pointed out that the site www.censusreporter. org is popular with journalists.

The next meeting of the WG is scheduled for 9/20 at 1:PM PST.

In a subsequent email, Ari wrote that Logan  mentioned that there is now actually an official Census Bureau Slack community. It even has an R channel!

You can learn more here:

https://github.com/RConsortium/censusguide/blob/master/training-resources/trainings.md#community-and-contacts