Merge pull request #223 from jdswinbank/finance-ctte-update-2021-11

December 2021 Finance Ctte update mail

Author: jdswinbank

finance/community-updates/2021-12.txt

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+Dear Astropy Community,
+
+The Finance Committee would like to give you some updates on our activities
+over the last year or so.
+
+# NASA funding
+
+In January of this year, several members of the project submitted a proposal
+to the NASA ROSES-2020 call, section E.7 (Support for Open Source Tools,
+Frameworks, and Libraries). The proposal included a mix of Project-wide
+infrastructure improvements, targeted work on specific areas of the code
+that are in need of support, enhancements to the our educational materials,
+and better support for affiliated packages. The full text (with some
+personal details redacted) is available at [1].
+
+The proposal was successful, and has provides a further $634,590 to support
+the fantastic work being undertaken by the Astropy Project. The Finance
+Committee will arrange processes for disbursing the funds which are
+consistent with the goals of the proposal and based on the model we've
+adopted for assigning Moore funding over the past couple of years.
+
+This is a huge milestone for the project: it shows that we've successfully
+used the Moore funding to build a solid set of processes and a governance
+structure which enables us to obtain support from more “traditional” sources
+of finance. This is a great step towards ensuring the financial viability of
+the project into the future.
+
+[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/18JsTRahNWnvign6ao6BP_OkINHnP8g3n/view
+
+# Gemini contract
+
+The Science User Support Department at Gemini Observatory has provided
+funding to the Astropy Project for maintenance and development work that
+benefits both the Astropy and DRAGONS projects. We've enlisted Simon Conseil
+as a part-time contractor (averaging 5 hours per week over a period of a
+year or two) to do this work. The details of the work are described in the
+statement of work [2].
+
+Having major facilities like Gemini invest in Astropy is another sign of
+both the critical role that the project plays in astronomical infrastructure
+worldwide, and of the increasing level of trust displayed in the project's
+responsible and sustainable governance.
+
+[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sKiFr5ypS3prkEqEu3s5nEejs0bD93cF7ihXSz3RdZM/edit
+
+# Distribution of Moore funds
+
+We organized a process to select and distribute funds from the Moore grant
+to a variety of projects, suggested and selected by the project membership.
+We've announced results in detail in the past [3] so we won't reiterate them
+in detail here, but we're delighted to report that most many of the projects
+are now well underway.
+
+We except to organize similar processes to distribute Moore and NASA funding
+in future years. We intend to keep improving our approach to make this as as
+transparent and effective as possible. To that end, We conducted a survey of
+the community to solicit your views [4]. This showed that:
+
+- There's a roughly even split between folks who like the established way of
+  voting (“thumbs up on GitHub”) and those who prefer an anonymous system;
+
+- There may be an opportunity to introduce more nuance to the voting (e.g.
+  by assigning priorities);
+
+- There's broad support for paying people to work on Astropy through an
+  institution;
+
+- The community places a roughly even priority on bringing in new people and
+  supporting existing maintainers.
+
+We will fold these results into our future plans, and continue to welcome your
+feedback at any time.
+
+[3] https://groups.google.com/g/astropy-dev/c/c1M2F7rZoF4/m/nbNdg1OsAAAJ
+[4] https://groups.google.com/g/astropy-dev/c/odnYnaBCZKI
+
+# Meetings, workshops, and other travel
+
+We've supported project members to participate in and represent Astropy at a
+number of conferences and workshops over the last year. These include:
+
+- Three project members were funded to (virtually) attended ADASS XXX, where
+  Brigitta Sipocz spoke on “astroquery: a community driven collaboration of
+  data providers and data consumers”. [5]
+
+- Three project members hosted the “Astropy and NumFocus Sponsored Projects”
+  booth in the Virtual Exhibit Hall at AAS 237. Project members also
+  provided two workshops: “Introduction to Astropy” and “Research with
+  Astropy”. [6]
+
+- Similarly, three project members participated in AAS 238, again hosting
+  workshops entitled “Introduction to Astropy” and “Astronomical Research
+  with Astropy”. [7]
+
+- We also supported three project members to participate in the SciPy 2021
+  conference and workshop. [8]
+
+The links below provide more information and take-away messages from each of
+these meetings.
+
+[5] https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/issues/141
+[6] https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/issues/140
+[7] https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/issues/201
+[8] https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/issues/210
+
+# No longer an Interim Finance Committee
+
+One of the first acts of the recently-elected Coordination Committee
+(“CoCo3”) was to confirm the Finance Committee, with its current members, as
+a part of standing project organization and to remove the “interim” from its
+title. We're now just the “Astropy Finance Committee”! 🎉
+
+Cheers,
+
+John
+on behalf of the Astropy Finance Committee