4 April 2019

Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors of NumFOCUS.

All votes are reported in the form “(Y/N/A)” (in favor-Y‚ opposed-N‚ abstentions-A; e.g. “4-1-2” means “4 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstentions”).

April 4, 2019

Attending:

Board Members: Andy Terrel, Jane Herriman, Lorena Barba, James Powell, Katrina Riehl, Sylvain Corlay

ED: Leah Silen

Board Members Not Attending: Stéfan van der Walt

Approval of Minutes from last meeting: Approved 4-0-0.

Resolutions Voted on by Email or Github: NA

Executive Director’s Report:

a. Staff members were joined by 12 project leads for a call on 03/29. Overall, it was a great meeting with non-stop Q&A.
The next call will be in May.

b. Conversations with Moore about funding are still underway.

c. MathJax and SciPy are in the process of onboarding as NumFOCUS projects.

Discussion Items:

a. FEniCS requested funding for their 2019 project meeting/ conference June 12-14 at the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, in DC. This is to be used for travel scholarships for researchers and contributors, targeted to underrepresented groups or those unable to fund their own travel, and is a request for renewal of funds granted last year.

i.  Approved 5-0-0 2400 USD funding for FEniCS. (This vote 
    occurred before Sylvain arrived.)

ii. We decided that we need to better define and advertise 
    the process for fiscally sponsored projects applying for 
    the 10K amount set aside from funds for small 
    development grants. In the future these funds will 
    target travel needs for projects.

b. Small Dev Grant Proposals

i.  Acceptance notifications are scheduled to be sent out on 
    the 19th. Ranking should be completed by the 15th in time 
    for any discussion prior to, or at the next board meeting 
    on the 18th of April.

ii.  The budget is 25K USD for this round and we had about 
     65K USD requested, spanning 16 proposals.

iii. Some unfunded projects would like feedback on why they 
     are rejected. The Board deemed that providing feedback 
     reports is too time consuming and would be better left 
     to a selection committee established to evaluate 
     proposals in the future.

v.   Andy will reach out to the PSF to seek funding for some 
     of the Python projects, hopefully allowing us to make 
     our Small Dev. Grant funds go farther.

vi.  We have a new process for ranking proposals: Each board 
     member will sort proposals into three bins by assigning 
     a 1, 2, or 3 to each project (with 1 denoting highest 
     priority). The projects with requests summing to 25K 
     with the lowest scores will be funded. The Board will 
     complete voting by April 11.