We are a team of developers from Bucharest, Romania, interesting in creating:

• open-source
• cross-platform
• out of the box working

tools that matter for millions of potential end users.

One of our project ideas is called DialogCreator, a visual tool that enables any user to create a dialog by adding and arranging commonly used elements in graphical user interfaces, such as: buttons, select boxes, radio choices, text entries, line separators etc. Each of these elements are assigned a certain part of a written command (such as function argument values), so that users less skilled in using command line interfaces will still be able to use a certain functionality.

Community contributed dialogs aggregate to an entire software that can be used in education at all levels, research and even general use. The use case scenario we have in mind is a GUI for the R statistical environment, similar to that of know commercial software such as SPSS but using the full power of R behind the scenes.

Another project idea that we currently work upon is a ready to use tool that enable researchers to document their data. In a world of ever increasing mass volumes of data, achieving data reuse heavily depends on the consistency and quality of the associated information about the data (the so-called metadata). We mapped the entire standard called DDI - Data Documentation Initiative into a key R package named DDIwR, that is capable of producing a single XML file containing both the data and the metadata into a structure called Codebook.

The Codebook is machine readable, and can be used for submission at a specialised public repository to achieve the expected deliverable of the so called DMP - Data Management Plan, common to all research projects receiving public funding.

Such a tool used to exist under the name of Nesstar, which only worked on Windows and its development was discontinued many years ago.

All of our software, part of the RODA Tools environment, are built on top of Node.js. The client side visible part is built using Electron.js, a framework that can create platform-specific installable binaries that looks the same under all operating systems.

The sponsorship will enable us to considerably speed up our development process. So far, we do all of this using our own personal resources and spare time. Funding will make it possible to focus and allocate more time to each of these projects, perhaps even expanding our team with more contributing members.