Merge pull request #270 from nstarman/cosmo_proposal

Phase 3 Funding | Starkman | Cosmology

Author: jdswinbank

finance/proposal-calls/cycle3/Starkman-Cosmology.md

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+### Title
+
+### Project Team
+
+Nathaniel Starkman (NS)
+
+
+### Project Description
+
+Continue role as astropy core maintainer and as the cosmology maintainer,
+working to expand cosmology compatibility with 3rd party libraries.
+
+`astropy.cosmology` does not plan to add a Boltzmann code nor other highly
+technical domain-specific tools. Many useful 3rd party cosmology codes already
+exist, e.g Boltzmann solvers like CLASS, for these purposes. Currently
+`astropy.cosmology` has limited-to-no interoperability with these commonly-used
+libraries. As maintainer, I will prioritize improving interoperability,
+enabling, e.g. someone to create a cosmology instance in Astropy and run on
+that cosmology the CLASS Boltzmann solver.
+
+
+### Project / Work
+
+Continue role as `astropy.cosmology` maintainer:
+
+- Contribute bug fixes and develop new features
+- Pull Request reviews and Issue triaging
+- Participate as a mentor to new contributors, as a part of a possible formal
+  contributor-to-maintainer training program
+- Continue developing a roadmap for the subpackage (GitHub Project in progress,
+  with ~171 complete and ~141 current, and many more planned)
+- Develop new contributed tutorial content on astropy.cosmology
+
+The `astropy.cosmology` package has very few (known) bugs and is mature, so it
+receives relatively few Pull Requests and Issues. Consequently, NS anticipates
+that interoperability improvements will occupy the majority of the budgeted
+time.
+
+
+Planned interoperability improvements for `astropy.cosmology`:
+
+- Entry-point support to astropy’s Unified I/O, which is in `astropy.io`. NS
+  will base this improvement on an existing reference implementation of his.
+  Entry-point support in Unified I/O will have use beyond `astropy.cosmology`,
+  e.g. allowing 3rd party formats to be available for I/O in `astropy.table`. 
+- Prioritize adding I/O support for the following tools: [CLASS]
+  (http://class-code.net) and [Colossus]
+  (https://bdiemer.bitbucket.io/colossus/cosmology_cosmology.html), adding
+  others as time permits.
+
+
+### Approximate Budget
+
+Target budget: $12,000 for 2 hours/week of work at $120/hour (rate negotiable).
+Minimum budget: $6,000 for 2 hours/week of work at $60/hour.
+
+### Approved Budget
+
+$12,000.00.