Announcing the PSF Project Funding Working Group

For the past 3 years, the PSF has been working on grant funded projects to improve our internal systems and platforms. This work has been done with the Packaging Working Group, and focused on our packaging ecosystem of PyPI and pip. We have been able to show that applying directed funding to open source projects has the ability to dramatically increase the speed of development, and move our community forward in a much more sustained way than relying solely on volunteer effort.

Along with the external grant funding of PSF projects, we have also committed PSF funds in the past to improve developments of community projects. This shows that the experience of directed funding is applicable to our community projects, as well as our own. An example here is the BeeWare project that was given funding via our Education Grants last year:

https://twitter.com/PyBeeWare/status/1273227908136316931

Another wonderful example has been a number of scientific Python projects that have raised large amounts of grant funding, mostly through NumFocus. They have been a large inspiration for our focus on grant funding as an important source of revenue for open source projects. The scientific open source community has been immeasurably improved by this funding, and we hope to expand this opportunity to the entire Python community.

Helping the community get funding

The PSF has created the Project Funding Working Group to help our community seek similar funding for their own projects. We hope to expand the amount of money going into the Python community as a whole, by providing resources and advice to projects who are interested in seeking funding from external sources.

Our charter starts with our intended purpose:

This Working Group researches, and advises Python community volunteers on applying for external grants and similar funding to advance the mission of the PSF, which includes, but is not limited to, things such as advancing the Python core, Python-related infrastructure, key Python projects, and Python education and awareness.

You can read the entire charter for more information about the vision for the group that we intend to build over the medium and long term.

Resources

In the short term, the first resource that we have put together is a list of potential funders that are applicable to our community. It’s on GitHub, and we welcome contributions to the list if you know of additional sources of funding. The other initial resource we are able to provide is advice, so if you have any questions about funding, you can email us at project-funding-wg@python.org, and we will do our best to help. We can advise you on picking tasks to propose, making a budget, writing a proposal, and more.

We are excited about the possibilities for the Python community when we see more funding being applied to our mission. There is a lot of amazing open source software out there being built by volunteers, and we hope that giving them additional resources will create even more impact for our mission of advancing the Python community. 

-- Eric Holscher, co-chair, Project Funding Working Group

PSF/NumFOCUS joint Working Group on Scientific Python

For the first time ever, the PSF has joined forces with another open source organization, NumFOCUS, to create a collaborative working group to make decisions on allocating grants or sponsorships for Scientific Python projects, conferences, etc. 

NumFOCUS, based in Austin Texas, has been promoting and funding open source computing resources for scientific research since 2012. Their core projects include AstroPi, Data Carpentry, IPython, Julia, SimPy, NumPy, and SciPy, Matplotlib, Cython, PyTables, and more.

This new joint working group was spearheaded by PSF Director David Mertz, who will co-chair along with mathematician and Python evangelist Tim Couper.

The PSF has recently pledged initial annual support in the amount of of US$25,000, and agreed to match any amount NumFOCUS contributes beyond $25,000, up to $50,000 contributed by the PSF, during the PSF Board meeting on 4/28/15 (for combined funding up to $100,000). 

Image credit: engineering.dartmouth.edu

In forming the Working Group, David reached out via the PSF members' list to call for volunteers. As he wrote,

This note is a call for volunteers … The work needed … [is] keeping in mind a finite budget, and evaluating and discussing requests that come in for grants or sponsorship relative to this budget. In the best case, people connected to scientific communities will also do some outreach to let groups know that funds are potentially available, but it’s also necessary just to weigh requests that come to us independently.

The call for volunteers led to an extremely impressive group representing a range of scientific expertise and interests. The PSF is confident in the group’s ability to make capable evaluations of grant requests that will ensure a judicious use of limited funds.

Here are the WG members' biographies:

David Mertz: Ph.D. in Political Philosophy, gone astray into computer theory, with a stint in computational biochemistry. He has been a Fellow of the PSF since 2008, and a Director since 2009. He is author of Text Processing in Python (Addison Wesley) and the series Charming Python (IBM developerWorks).

Tim Couper: Oxford D.Phil. in Mathematics. Python evangelist and consultant for 16 years, now based in Scotland. Extensive python experience with organisations of all sizes from startups to large retail, pharmaceuticals & finance (banking & hedge funds).

Anthony Scopatz: Computational Physicist and avid Python developer since 2002 and PSF Fellow since 2013. He is coauthor of Effective Computation in Physics (O'Reilly). He will be joining the University of South Carolina as a tenure-track faculty member in Mechanical Engineering in August 2015.

Stéfan van der Walt: Assistant Researcher at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has been an active member of the scientific Python community since 2006, and frequently teaches Python at workshops and conferences. He is the founder of scikit-image and a contributor to numpy, scipy and dipy.

Travis Oliphant: Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Mayo Clinic; professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU 2001 to 2007 with research in inverse problems and biomedical imaging; creator of SciPy, author of NumPy; founder of Numba, PyData, NumFOCUS, and Continuum Analytics. Currently CEO of Continuum.

Leah Silen: Executive Director of NumFOCUS, Leah has been involved daily in the support of the Python scientific computing community since NumFOCUS began three years ago. She has worked with the board of directors to initiate and carry out fiscal sponsorship, fellowship and grant programs funding both projects and individuals. She has also worked through the organization of PyData events to further support the community as well as on scholarship review committees of multiple conferences.

Dana Bauer: Geographer, Pythonista, open data enthusiast, mom to a future robot programmer. Dana has over 54 repositories at GitHub and works as a developer at Rackspace. 

Kurt Kaiser is the Treasurer of the Python Software Foundation.

Congratulations to the organizers and members and best of luck in your important work. We look forward to hearing about your activities.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.