Hello, NumFOCUS Community! It’s me, Gina—the Director of Communications and Culture.
Most of the time I write these blog posts from a more “official” point of view. Today I’m writing very personally, from me to all of you, to let you know that I will be leaving NumFOCUS. I’ve accepted a new position as Program Officer for Global Technology at Internews, where I’ll be working to support the development of open source tools protecting digital safety and access to uncensored information worldwide.
While I am excited for this next step in my career, I am genuinely sad to be leaving the NumFOCUS organization. I first joined NumFOCUS back in July of 2015, when we were just a two-person staff supporting fewer than 10 sponsored projects. It has been one of the highlights of my career to help grow this organization to what it is today: a staff of 8 supporting over 30 sponsored projects and 30 affiliated projects, plus a global community of tens of thousands of supporters!
I have truly enjoyed getting to know so many people in our community over the past 4 years. NumFOCUS supporters are so incredibly friendly, welcoming, and helpful — we are very lucky to have such a great community. It has been my honor to work to advance the mission of NumFOCUS and to get to support this incredible global community. I will really miss it! If you’d like to keep in touch, I’m on Twitter at @ginahelfrich.
NumFOCUS will soon be posting a job opening for a new person to help take on some of my communications duties — you can help us out by spreading the word with your networks and sending us great potential candidates.
Thanks for everything, and I can’t wait to see the continued growth and impact NumFOCUS is creating for open source scientific computing!
If you’d like to say “thanks,” please consider making a donation to NumFOCUS in my honor:
~Gina