Make your gift now and TRIPLE your impact!
Who wrote that open-source software you’re using? Give them thanks.
I use open-source tools in my work almost daily. And you? I teach courses in numerical computing to engineering students, relying 100% on open-source libraries. Python libraries like NumPy, Matplotlib, SymPy, IPython, and of course Jupyter notebooks are integral to both my research and teaching roles.
Are you a data scientist? Well, you’re likely using Julia, rOpenSci, pandas, AstroPy, or PyTables. These are all open-source projects that exist thanks to the volunteer effort of coders, individual donations, and contributions from employers who pay the salary of coders.
In addition to the volunteer or employer-contributed time of developers, these open-source projects do need paid professional software engineers, and they need cloud resources, compute time and storage. The devs sometimes need to travel to conferences to present their progress and participate in hackathons. And we all benefit when they can hire an intern to help write those docs.
So, as you go through your end-of-year tax planning or down your shopping list for the holidays, add one more thing: a donation to NumFOCUS—the non-profit organization that serves as the legal, financial and governance umbrella for these open-source projects.
Your donation to the NumFOCUS general fund will be used to support specific needs of our sponsored projects, programs and events that sustain and develop the open source data science community, and grants to support individual developers. You can also direct your donation specifically to your favorite project.
NumFOCUS also sponsors a Diversity in Scientific Computing program and offers the John Hunter Technology Fellowship for postdoctoral and senior PhD students. (John Hunter was the creator of Matplotlib.)
We are two weeks away from the end of 2015, and NumFOCUS is launching a campaign to raise funds before the end of the year, spurred by the challenge of an anonymous donor who offered to match the first $5,000 donated. Why?
“As a person who develops technical codes, I can’t imagine where I would be without the NumFOCUS tools. My donation is to help make those tools better for science and technical innovation for all.”
Click the green button to make a tax-deductible donation that you can direct to a specific project or to NumFOCUS programs in general (you will get an automatic tax receipt).
Help us reach our goal of $5,000 in donations by the end of the year, which will be 200% matched!