I've just returned from Front Royal where I spent two days at a workshop hosted by the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian has a Conservation and Research Centre there which started out as a site for excess animals from the National Zoo.

The workshop was about R, a programming language and environment for statistical analysis. It was taught by Glen Sergeant from the USGS (who was brilliant, just by the way).

R is freeware and is truly a global collaboration. My reason for writing a blog about it is to highlight what is possible when people are selfless and cooperative. R is an incredible collection of free packages designed by people in their own time and made freely available. It is a potential replacement for similar software that costs a substantial amount of money. Simply, it is very GOOD.

Learning about R gave me hope that we can move away from a consumer-society in which large multi-national corporations rule supreme (... Apple and Microsoft etc). R is a software analog for things like farmers' cooperatives, for community development projects, and for charities. Seeing how something of this nature can produce something that is good and of great use to people around the world is an indication that we can overcome other similar problems through global collaboration and selfless acts from individuals.