origins.Rmd

---
title: "About"
description: |
  Details about the reconverse
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)
```

# Overview
Members of the [R Epidemics Consortium](https://www.repidemicsconsortium.org/)
have, for many years, been creating resources and software that could be used
to inform the response to disease outbreaks, health emergencies and
humanitarian crises. During this time, as well as providing training materials,
running workshops and having members deployed to the field to help with data
analytics, a variety of [R](https://www.r-project.org/) packages have been
created to enable analysts to quickly solve the problems they have (e.g.
[epicontacts](https://www.repidemicsconsortium.org/epicontacts/),
[epiestim](https://github.com/mrc-ide/EpiEstim),
[incidence](https://www.repidemicsconsortium.org/incidence/)).

Since the early days of RECON,  the landscape of packages for the analysis of
epidemics has grown, evolved and diversified, benefiting from feedback and
contributions from our members as well as other groups. While such organic
growth was needed and resulted in overall improvements of available tools, it
has also led to a less consistent software landscape, with several packages
overlapping or duplicating efforts, limited interoperability, and varying coding
and development standards.  Being aware that fragmented software landscapes can
be the bane of data scientists
(e.g. [Excoffier and Heckel 2006](https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg1904), we
realise there is also benefit to having a coherent and composable set of
packages for users. The *reconverse* aims to address this. Much like the
[tidyverse](https://www.tidyverse.org/) is "an opinionated collection of R
packages designed for data science", the reconverse aims to be an opinionated
ecosystem of packages for Outbreak Analytics.