NumFOCUS

Presentation to XSEDE science gateways seminar.

Transcript

1. NumFOCUS A foundation for sustaining Open Science Software Tools
2. Outline Who we are Why we exist What we do How you can help
3. Why we exist
4. What happens to software that is not maintained?
5. Software just like houses needs to be maintained. Without real support and constant care, software becomes less useful.
6. What happens to scientific software developers?
7. Philip Bourne (aka now Director of NIH) at the Workshop for Sustainable Scientific Software: Practice and Experience (WSSSPE) described the Google Bus Problem. His lab now gets on a Google bus rather than contributing back to scientific advances
8. Okay so if science needs software, and software needs developers. Where do we put them?
9. Many software developers work at Government labs, Instrument sites, HPC centers, or stay in the academic temporary worker program, aka Postdoc.
10. Why doesn’t this just work?
11. Legal structures between organization make it difficult to collaborate on projects. While academic funding gets tighter, the salaries in companies are growing. The constant flow of scientific software writers out of the community impacts the quality of software being used by all of science.
12. One example:
 The IPython Project
13. You might have seen them in Nature as The Scientists Digital Toolbox
14. Team is on two continents, four academic institutions, and several companies. If they go through normal channels of academic funding, the project would see about 30% of that money. And would be bound by the universities pay structure, thus not being able to pay for the talent they require.
15. When our institutions fail us, it’s time to create new ones.
16. Who we are
17. http:/ /numfocus.org/projects/ We promote over 20 different scientific software projects We span projects written in Python, R, Julia, C, C++, Fortran and even JavaScript Our community exists because of a need of usable software for the advancement of science.
18. http:/ /numfocus.org/foundation/ Our founding started with 5 members of the scientific Python community. We now have 1 full time executive director, 9 board members, advisors, and vice presidents We come from government labs, academia, and industry
19. http:/ /numfocus.org/take-action/sponsorship.html Our sponsors mostly come from industry, but we are working with more governmental and private foundations as well.
20. What we do
21. Support Software Projects
22. Fund Training of Software Training
23. Encourage Under-represented groups
24. Host events such as conferences, hackathons, and meet ups
25. How you can help
26. Become a member Donate to NumFOCUS Encourage Corporate and Foundation Sponsorship Join the discussion on mailing lists http:/ /numfocus.org/take-action/ Donate to NumFOCUS