Coding in a Cyclone: open-source and the public sector in the birthplace of R
summary
An analyst at Auckland Council replaces a chaotic Excel roster for emergency shelters ahead of Cyclone Gabriel by creating an R workflow that collapses a monthly, multi‑day copy‑paste task into under an hour after ~six weeks of learning; code sits on a private GitHub org and some tools (packagepal) land on CRAN; nine‑month secondment seeds team adoption, tests and docs, and the talk argues a mature data culture needs proficiency, business value, and sustainability.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:07R in 2020
- 7:49Automating processes
- 9:41Cyclone Gabriel response
- 10:47Public sector value
- 12:36Learning versus delivery
- 13:40Sustainable solutions
- 15:28Data culture at Auckland Council
- 16:54Data culture pillars
- 17:15Q&A
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