The 2018 NumFOCUS Board Selections have concluded and we are proud to announce our new directors.

These directors will take their positions during our annual Summit, taking place in New York from Sept 22-25. Our incoming board members are:

Sylvain Corlay — Sylvain has been leading the efforts for NumFOCUS EU incorporation for the past year.  He has been involved in the open source scientific computing stack since 2012, maintained the Jupyter interactive widgets framework and co-authored several data visualization packages.

 

Jane Herriman — Jane is currently the Director of Diversity and Outreach at Julia Computing, where she helps guide the Julia Language, a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project. She was also active in the DISC working group in its first year.

 

James Powell —  James has played a vital role in organizing the PyData community while serving as a liaison during his years as a NumFOCUS Vice President. He has attended 30+ PyData events throughout the world helping to recruit the best talent and ideas to better the community. James has also worked with core developers behind numerous NumFOCUS projects to advance their communities.

 

Katrina Riehl — Katrina is currently the Director of Global Data Science at HomeAway, where she manages a large data science program. As a passionate Pythonista for the last 20 years, Katrina has worked on multiple scientific software systems built on open source technologies and furthering Data Science as a discipline at well-known institutions such as Apple, Expedia, and DARPA.

 

Stéfan van der Walt — Stéfan has been involved in the open source scientific Python ecosystem for more than a decade, arguing for the adoption of open tooling in making computational science transparent. Most recently, he has been working with the NumPy community and managing two full-time developers at UC Berkeley to explore how funded development can coordinate with and complement community efforts.

They will join directors Andy Terrel and Lorena Barba, who are continuing to serve on the Board.

212 out of 763 eligible donating and volunteering members submitted endorsements. There were 48 nominees and 25 candidates who accepted the nomination. This led to a tight ranking with only a few votes separating the top candidates. At the ratification and selection meeting, the council decided to consider all the candidates with at least 5% of the vote for a position on the board. We would like to honor the finalists by listing them here, in alphabetical order:

• Safia Abdalla,
• Jiahao Chen,
• Marc Garcia,
• Steven G. Johnson,
• Andreas Mueller,
• Laura Noren, and
• Peter Wang.

We only had 5 seats available and the selection process took into account several necessary attributes for the board, including diversity, members willing to serve as officers, and a range of backgrounds and expertise for leading this rapidly growing organization.

Thank you to all who participated and continue to help NumFOCUS serve our community better. We are thrilled to see the enthusiasm and energy from the community in supporting and guiding the future direction of NumFOCUS.

We experienced a number of challenges during the Board Selection Process this year. If you are interested to learn about them, I have written a separate blog post here.