NumFOCUS Accomplishments in 2017
2017 has been an incredible year for NumFOCUS! Here’s a quick list of highlights to date:
- NumFOCUS Projects Power the Nobel Prize-Winning LIGO Discovery
- NumPy Receives Their First Ever Grant Funding
- Four new sponsored projects joined us (SunPy, Shogun, Econ-ARK, & Open Journals)
- The worldwide PyData community more than doubled, from just over 20,000 at the beginning of the year to more than 45,000 now! (27 new chapters; 72 chapters total)
- Inaugural PyData Conferences were launched in New Delhi, India; Warsaw, Poland; and San Luis, Argentina—plus the first ever JupyterCon
- We launched two important new programs: the Sustainability Program and the DISC Program
- We held the 2nd annual NumFOCUS Summit & the first ever Sustainability Workshop
- Google Summer of Code 2017 — NumFOCUS community members mentored 52 students across 11 projects
- We awarded $13,000 in small development grants to the projects thanks to Member donations!
We can’t wait to expand upon our success this year for an even more exciting 2018! But to do that, we need your help…
#GivingTuesday
NumFOCUS is excited to participate in “Giving Tuesday” (Nov. 28th) this year, just after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Inspired by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday calls on the public to invest in charity instead of consumerism.
We’re throwing a “friendraiser” in an effort to grow our overall membership, and we need your help!
What’s a Friendraiser?
We’re asking our community of supporters to reach out to your friends and colleagues and invite them to become a member of NumFOCUS. (Curious if you’re already a NumFOCUS Member? Check for your name at the bottom of the page here.)
Rather than focusing on a specific fundraising goal, our #GivingTuesday friendraiser is focused on signing up as many new Community, Supporting, and Sustaining Members as possible.
(No, not that kind of “friend-raising”)
How Does Membership Help NumFOCUS Projects?
From Netflix to NASA, researchers use NumFOCUS tools to solve the most challenging problems. Support the open source projects that power innovation and discovery by becoming a NumFOCUS Member this #GivingTuesday.
NumFOCUS provides a stable, independent, and professional home for projects in the open source scientific data stack. We help provide funding, operational services, and expertise to support long term sustainability for critical scientific computing tools.
Donations from NumFOCUS Members go towards providing direct support to the open source software projects that you use and love.
This year, donations from Members supported development work including the first SymPy release since 1.0, full Python 3 support for MDAnalysis, an h5py backend for PyTables, and more. (Details on our blog.)
Become a Member
Get Involved
Helping out is easy! First, create a “friendraising” page. Then reach out to your friends & colleagues who use and love NumFOCUS projects and ask them to become a Member (make a donation via your page).
The more Members we have, the stronger our projects are, and the more stable and sustainable they will be over the long term!
You can also form or join a team and friendraise together. Compete against other teams to sign up the most new members — have fun with it!
We’re here to help: reach out to info[at]numfocus.org with questions.