[yt-dev] Proposal: NumFOCUS Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement

Matthew Turk matthewturk at gmail.com
Fri Jan 29 07:15:45 PST 2016


Hi Brian,

I don't have much of a sense of this, specifically with respect to
NSF/NASA/DOE.  Private foundations and corporations have contributed to
NumFOCUS, as you can see on the main website.  My suspicion is that the
holdup would probably be the university that enters into the agreement with
NSF/NASA/DOE rather than on the NumFOCUS side.

Additionally, at the present, I don't anticipate we would want to fund
salaries through NumFOCUS, although it isn't my role to say whether we
would or not.  Partial support for workshops and for infrastructure, yes,
but I think supporting a couple folks to attend a workshop is a different
story than salaries, unless they were for fixed-term contracts or for
summer programs and the like.

-Matt

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Brian O'Shea <bwoshea at gmail.com> wrote:

> +1
>
> This seems like a great idea to me.  There's one thing that I'm really
> curious about: can we use grant money to contribute to the yt project
> through this mechanism?  Essentially my entire research group now depends
> on yt for analysis and visualization of our simulations, and I know that's
> now true for a lot of people.  I really want to directly support core
> infrastructure development, and would be happy to write line-items into all
> of my grants (in the way that one would ask for grant money for a laptop
> for a grad student, HPC buy-in, or an outreach assessment consultant) to
> provide some recurring funding to the yt project.  This would both directly
> help the project by contributing to salaries, workshops, etc., and
> indirectly help by communicating to federal agencies that this is an
> important and widely valued endeavor.  But, I have no idea if people have
> used grant money in this way, or if it is even allowable under NSF/NASA/DOE
> regulations.  Matt, do you have any sense of this?
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 11:26 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> The NumFOCUS organization is a 501(c)3 dedicated to both open source
>> scientific software and computational science education ( numfocus.org ).
>> I have recently been named to their board of directors.
>>
>> NumFOCUS supports many projects familiar to us here, including NumPy,
>> Matplotlib, Jupyter, Astropy, and Sympy, as well as rOpenSci, Data
>> Carpentry, Software Carpentry and Julia.
>>
>> After talking this over with Britton, I would like to propose that we
>> join NumFOCUS through a comprehensive Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement.  This
>> process is outlined here:
>>
>> http://www.numfocus.org/apply-for-fiscal-sponsorship.html
>>
>> Organizations such as NumPy and rOpenSci have detailed their reasons for
>> participating in this program here:
>>
>> https://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2015-October/073926.html
>> https://ropensci.org/blog/2014/10/01/numfocus-partnership/
>>
>> Primarily, I think that this would help with our ability to exist
>> independently of a single investigator; grants for programs such as
>> workshops, project infrastructure, and so on can be managed by NumFOCUS
>> (which has low overhead) and can be affiliated with the project.
>>
>> I think this is something that warrants discussion, and perhaps should be
>> talked over in person during a team meeting, but I believe that this would
>> be a strong step forward for us as a project and a community.
>>
>> -Matt
>>
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