R appeal to Ministry of Digital Affairs of Poland

Dear Minister Anna Streżyńska


I would like humbly to propose that Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs should support  the development of R community in Poland with a dedicated government program.


R community is a dynamically growing number of users of free R statistical environment which facilitates (indeed makes it easy for everyone) programming, data cleaning, exploration and data mining. In Warsaw alone it includes growing number of  enthusiasts, Warsaw Open University alumni of R courses, regular meetups (http://www.spotkania-entuzjastow-r.pl/), Smarter Poland activities and many others.


R, can provide a single environment for:

-  online access to public statistical data (medical, social, crime, economic, weather),

- a remote interactive teaching data science and programming in schools - teaching the IT skills that will be of immediate use to anyone  from business startup-per to hobbyist building a drone capable of  machine learning),

- visualizing and representing analysis results related to Poland (choropleths or subplots imposed on the map of Poland)

- the environment can also be set up for quick generating very high quality and publication ready reports that can be immediately printed and published on-line.


R can facilitate government transparency and promoting Open Government programme. (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html, http://ropengov.github.io/)


Some ideas of what Ministry of Digital Affairs can coordinate and assist with is:

- development of a dedicated R package for accessing public data, analysing and visualising it on an administrative map of Poland,

-development of an R distance learning package teaching statistics to Polish students (it can be the the matter of preparing a localized quality content, the tool "swirl" is available for that purpose),

- encouragement of public offices to publish current data that can be easily analyzed in R (csv, . This can be current information from treasury, statistical offices, police (geography of crime incidents), weather, health diagnosis and procedures (NHF and Ministry of Health data) - information devoid of personal information but fresh and detailed enough for Polish citizen to make informed decisions.


Advantages for Polish administration and economy:

Free R can be compared to expensive SPSS, Statistica and SAS packages - it can save millions giving powerful mining capabilities to government at any level and all citizens. It has been popular with world best universities, now it is used by big media houses, banks and research labs.

R data mining can be used for evectively analysing any data and drawing right conclusions in  health management, poverty, tax evasion, crime incidence, even counterintelligence and anti-terrorism. R literacy can generate high quality jobs and bring measurable profit because it is a tool facilitating innovation and right decisions based on science.

It gives Poland a unique chance to be among the first to embrace the ideas of true modern democracy expressed in access to information and true modern freedom of making informed choices.


Sincerely Yours,

Jacek Kotowski