At this years NEARC meeting I decided to give a lightning talk on using R as a GIS. As I was working on this I thought, “why not try a lightning demo?” That would be better than five minutes of slides on packages and commands. But, as anyone who has done a live demo will know, they often provide unexpected challenges. Add a 5 minute limit to that, and well, some level of failure is sure to occur. Becuase of this I have decided put everything into a web page so that the attendees (and others) can access the full demo at a later date. The full text and code is at http://jwhollister.com/rgis_lightning_demo.