One of the mechanisms by which R has been extended and improved has been through the efforts of students and mentors in the Google Summer of Code initiatives. This year Toby Hocking (along with others) has continued to lead this effort. This year, Google has changed the format somewhat so that the projects are shorter. There will likely be more of them. For success, we have learned that projects need at least 2 mentors -- illness, life events, world events and holidays can get in the way of monitoring student work and handling the minor but critical short reports to Google to ensure money gets to deserving students (and does not get sent otherwise!). Please consider mentoring and/or proposing a project. See https://github.com/rstats-gsoc/gsoc2021/wiki/ As an example, my own proposal concerns improving the behaviour and features of the nls() function. https://github.com/rstats-gsoc/gsoc2021/wiki/Improvements-to-nls() John Nash