22 Sept 2020

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”).

September 22, 2020

Participating:

Board Members: Jane Herriman, Katrina Riehl, Andy Terrel, Stéfan van der Walt, Lorena Barba

Executive Director: Leah Silen

Not attending: Sylvain Corlay, James Powell

Email/Github Voting:

We have minutes from several meetings available for voting on Github.

Executive Director’s Report:

We discussed various NumFOCUS diversity initiatives (including DISC-related and project-mentored sprints for people from underrepresented groups) and the need for more support. We also discussed the need to put more money into D&I efforts if they are to succeed – for example, considering compensating participants in training programs designed to help members of underrepresented groups to tool up to contribute to open source, and compensating someone to help lead D&I efforts through NF.

Quansight made a donation from Q1 & Q2 of their research labs program and is asking companies that hire them to pay NumFOCUS a percentage of what they pay QS labs.

Discussion:

a. Evaluation of Diversity Initiatives

See notes under ED report.

b. Update on NF Academy

Lorena demoed what the NF Academy platform currently looks like. The platform will integrate with Jupyter notebooks (including python, Julia, and R kernels) and also with GPUs.

c. Affiliated Research Lab Donation|Preferred Provider Program (Tabled)

d. Our 3rd and Final 2020 Small Development Grant Cycle is open

i.  Deadline for Proposal Submission: October 19

ii. Projects will be Notified: November 27 (or sooner)