On Saturday 7th March 2020, the tenth Open Data Day took place with people around the world organising over 300 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data. Thanks to generous support from key funders, the Open Knowledge Foundation was able to support the running of more than 60 of these events via our mini-grants scheme.
This blogpost is a report from Exegetic Analytics in South Africa who received funding from Mapbox to expose the South African R community to a range of resources for working with open spatial data.
satRday Joburg warmed up with an RLadies Joburg event hosted by Rain where our keynotes, Heather Turner and Colin Fay, spoke to us about publishing and promoting your R package as well as contributing to the R ecosystem. Coupled with pizza and great company this event was thoroughly enjoyed by all.
satRday Joburg officially kicked off on 4 March 2020 with a 2-day “Introduction to R” workshop held by Bianca Peterson. The purpose of this workshop was to provide foundational knowledge to empower new R users with the right skills (and confidence) in order for them to efficiently tackle real-world problems. This workshop covered everything from connecting to Rstudio cloud to Data Visualisation.
On 6 March, satRday workshop participants were spoilt for choice with a selection of three full-day workshops. Topics included “Building Successful Shiny Apps with {golem}” by Colin Fay, “R Package Development” by Heather Turner and “Web Scraping with R” by Megan Beckett & Andrew Collier.
The satRday conference took place on 7 March 2020 at the Discovery building in the heart of Sandton. The programme (consisting of 21 presentations) was varied, catering for the diverse range of interests. Attendees seemed to really enjoy the diverse range of topics and variance in presentation lengths ranging from 5-minute lightning talks, 20-minute standard talks and finally to 45-minute keynote talks. Throughout the day the hashtag #satRdayJoburg was flying all over Twitter with the R community (both in attendance and elsewhere) sharing words of encouragement and admiration for talks and the atmosphere of the conference as a whole.
Here are some of our favourite excerpts:
Spotlight: Meet our teammate @hendrikvanb , Mahlatse, @DianaPholo and @MichaelHamman15 who were present at @satRday_ZAF.
Keep up the great work, guys!?#DataScientists #dataengineering #teamwork #rstats pic.twitter.com/ys7GqStabZ
— Predictive Insights (@predictive_ins) March 9, 2020
New blogpost: What I didn’t expect to learn at @satRday_ZAF. tl;dr: Be kind. Be supportive. If you don’t know how, either go climbing or go to the next satRday to learn. #rstats #satRdayJoburghttps://t.co/VxYZaVTdWU
— hendrikvanb (@hendrikvanb) March 10, 2020
So @satRday_ZAF was my first tech conference, coming from an academic background and I just want to compare and contrast this experience with academic conferences I have been to… #satRdayJoburg
— Astrid (@dataccino) March 8, 2020
Organising a conference is a huge endeavour and it would not have been possible without the hard work of the organising committee or the generous financial assistance of our sponsors:
