2017 has been an outstanding year for NumFOCUS in a number of ways. Everything we’re able to accomplish is thanks to you, our community of supporters. In this post, we highlight a few notable stories from the year showcasing NumFOCUS’s growth and achievements—all made possible by you!
Two New “Firsts” for NumFOCUS Projects
Five NumFOCUS projects were used to power the LIGO Discovery that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics:
- Jupyter
- IPython
- Stan
- NumPy
- Matplotlib
NumPy received its first ever grant funding, courtesy of the Moore Foundation.
Growth of the Community
New sponsored projects
Four new sponsored projects made NumFOCUS their home:
PyData Network Nearly Tripled in Size
The worldwide PyData community more than doubled, from just over 20,000 members at the beginning of the year to just under 56,000 now! (33 new chapters; 78 chapters total across 34 countries)
Congratulations to all of the PyData chapter organizers on your amazing work growing local communities of data science enthusiasts!
Local communities in New Delhi, India; Warsaw, Poland; and San Luis, Argentina also partnered with NumFOCUS to organize their inaugural PyData Conferences in 2017.
New Programs, New Staff
Sustainability
NumFOCUS welcomed Christie Koehler as Projects Director to oversee our new Sustainability Program, made possible by a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and convened the Sustainability Advisory Board to support the program:
- Nadia Eghbal
- Karl Fogel
- Daniel S. Katz
- Renata Rawlings-Goss
- Tracy Teal
- Todd Vision
Christie organized the first ever Sustainability Workshop at the 2017 NumFOCUS Summit. Over 50 stakeholders from the NumFOCUS community were in attendance, including project leaders and maintainers, sustaining funders, advisory council members, board members, and staff.
Diversity & Inclusion
NumFOCUS welcomed back Gina Helfrich as Communications Director and, thanks in part to a grant from the Moore Foundation, also appointed her as Program Manager for Diversity and Inclusion overseeing the DISC Program.
NumFOCUS’s long-standing efforts to advance diversity in scientific computing received increased support and expert guidance in the form of the new DISC Committee:
- Alex Companioni (Data Scientist, iHeartRadio)
- Gina Helfrich (NumFOCUS Communications Director; DISC Program Manager) — DISC Committee Chair
- Julie Hollek (Data Scientist, Twitter; Diversity Committee Chair, SciPy)
- Jennifer Klay (Professor of Physics, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; NumFOCUS Board of Directors)
- Julia Meinwald (Open Source Coordinator, Two Sigma Investments)
- Erica Moszkowski (Doctoral Student in Business Economics, Harvard Business School)
- Manuel Rivas (Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford)
- Reshama Shaikh (Data Scientist; Organizer for NYC Women in Machine Learning & Data Science)
