The goal of soda is to allow you to programmatically access a wealth of open data resources from governments, non-profits, and NGOs around the world using the Socrata Open Data API (SODA) or Discovery API.
There is another R package, RSocrata, that supports basic interactions with the SODA API; however, there has not been a commit to the package in nearly two years. The soda package is intended to succeed RSocrata, providing nicer outputs and more functionality.
This package is currently very early in development and I welcome contributions, suggestions, and ideas.