After the Census Bureau commissioned a course on choroplethr I became interested in surveying R’s ecosystem for working with Census data.
Together with Logan Powell (at the time a Developer Experience Lead at Census) I submitted a proposal to the R Consortium to address this gap. The proposal called for the R Consortium to create a Census Working Group to conduct research and publish its results. The proposal was accepted and our results were published in A Guide to Working with Census Data in R.
In 2023 the R Consortium Census Group was renewed and we published a new version of the Guide in 2024.