first draft of learn astropy 2021 proposal

Author: eblur

finance/proposal-calls/2021-proposal/learn-astropy.md

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+# Learn Astropy Maintenance Funding Proposal
+
+## Project Team
+
+This funding proposal is for a sub-award to University of Michigan
+that will support the following people in the Learn Astropy Project:
+* Lia Corrales - tutorial content lead and a leader in the Learn
+  Astropy community
+* Ana Gabela - administrative support
+* Undergraduate work-study student - for testing and updating tutorial
+  content
+
+We are also requesting funding for independent contractors:
+* David Shupe (IPAC) - workshop leader and content maintainer
+* Mariana Meireles - community study consultant
+
+## Project description
+
+This funding request covers ongoing maintenance of Learn Astropy
+activities as well as some crucial tasks needed to bring the Learn
+Astropy tutorials library into convergence with the latest releases of
+Astropy.
+
+### Learn Astropy project maintenance
+
+Lia Corrales is the primary person responsible for coordinating the
+project by scheduling Learn Astropy telecons and maintaining the Learn
+Astropy Initiatives project board. She coordinates efforts of various
+team members, including website infrastructure, documentation, and new
+content development. She also acts as reviewer and frequent
+collaborator for new tutorial content pull requests. She typically
+logs about 120 hours per year on the Learn Astropy project (0.75
+person-months, reflected in the budget request).
+
+We are requesting administrative support for activities that are
+normally undertaken by Lia Corrales around AAS exhibit hall and
+workshop periods, which will free time for her to focus more on Learn
+Astropy content. The administrative assistant, Ana Gabela, already
+works with Lia and is an authorized contractor through University of
+Michigan. She will provide assistance in organizing the Astropy
+exhibit hall presence for future AAS meetings; designing,
+administering and summarizing survey assessments of the Astropy
+workshops; and organizing meeting schedules. We estimate that this
+will take up 20 hours over the course of the year.
+
+A crucial task for keeping the Learn Astropy website useful for the
+community is ensuring that it is up-to-date. The sub-award to UM will
+be used to fund undergraduate work-study. The student will be
+responsible for testing all current notebooks, bringing them up to
+date with the latest version of Astropy, and assessing the notebooks
+for future improvement. This is a useful input that can seed new
+tutorial ideas and recruit new tutorial content developers and Astropy
+contributors. We anticipate hiring 1-2 students for 6 hours per week.
+
+### Astropy Workshop maintenance and growth
+
+David Shupe is the primary person responsible for soliciting and
+coordinating volunteers for Astropy Workshops offered at meetings of
+the American Astronomical Society (AAS). We have traditionally held
+workshops once per year at the Winter AAS meetings. This work has
+grown to two half-day workshops (AAS 237) and is becoming a
+semi-annual event with the inclusion of an Astropy Workshop for the
+Summer AAS meeting (AAS 238).
+
+Workshop coordination includes: preparing workshop proposals,
+currently to the AAS; setting the workshop schedule of presentations
+including the presenters; updating and refining the installation
+instructions; maintaining the astropy-workshop repository and
+reviewing pull requests for updated content; and communicating with
+workshop registrants prior to and during each workshop.
+
+### Astropy community survey and demographics
+
+Mariana Meireles is a software engineer at QuantStack developing tools
+for the NumFOCUS ecosystem, focusing on Jupyter products. Prior to
+QuantStack she worked as a developer on the PySide team at the Qt
+Company and as a web performance developer at Mozilla in the WebCompat
+team.
+
+Mariana has experience in using the Github API to examine contributor
+demographics in open source communities. We would like to hire her as
+a consultant for the Learn Astropy team to develop surveys and
+techniques to examine Astropy user and contributor demographics. She
+will also help us build a survey to examine users’ needs from the
+Learn Astropy ecosystem -- tutorial availability, Astropy tasks
+desired (which can inform the future of the project as well as
+learning materials), and performance. This will be a small project
+that will dovetail with the demographic studies undertaken by the
+NumFocus DISC community; we anticipate approximately 10 hours of work.
+
+## Budget
+
+The total requests sum to $19,650
+
+Sub-award to UM: 
+* Corrales Summer Salary, 0.75 months = $10,000 (including fringe)
+* Administrator: 20 hours of work at $50 per hour = $1,000
+* Undergraduate work-study: 110 hours of work at $15 per hour = $1,650
+* Total: $12,650
+
+Independent contractor work for David Shupe: per workshop, 30 hours of
+work at $100 per hour; two workshops per year = $6000
+
+Independent contractor work for Mariana Meireles: 10 hours of work at
+$100 per hour = $1000