Season’s greetings, everyone! On this #givingtuesday we’d like to share some highlights from the past year to help kick off our 2021 Year-End Fundraiser.
This year has been an important one for NumFOCUS during which we’ve reached several milestones. We onboarded five new Sponsored and four new Affiliated Projects including GDAL, LFortran, and NetworkX. As we continue to diversify our project family we are proud to represent a growing share of the open-source scientific ecosystem.
Our second online PyData Global was a huge success: more than 2,100 attendees and 30 corporate sponsors joined us for 215 engaging presentations, 7 open source sprints, two pub quizzes, and a supply chain bot challenge. Our Impact Scholarship program was unveiled this year, a reimagining of our former Diversity Scholarship program. This new model addressed the broader needs of equity and inclusion beyond the conference experience. Recipients were paired with mentors, helped to further develop their careers, and were given opportunities to connect to professionals in their field.
We also hosted our first-ever Supporter Summit, an event that brought together our many stakeholders for a closer look into our work to establish an inclusive scientific community of actively supported open source projects. The event included conversations with several NumFOCUS program and volunteer leaders and featured a panel discussion on Project Community Development with maintainers from ArviZ, Julia, Project Jupyter, and rOpenSci. You can visit our YouTube channel for the panel discussion and to learn more about how our projects grow their communities of users and developers!
Our Contributor Diversification and Retention research project is about to conclude its first year. 20 NumFOCUS Sponsored Projects are collaborating with us to better understand their governing members and contributor bases through survey research and in-depth interviews. The goal is to provide best practices to enable projects to be more inclusive, such as developing data-informed strategies to address barriers to entry for contributors from underrepresented backgrounds and geographies.
Finally, earlier this year NumFOCUS earned a Gold Seal of Transparency from GuideStar, an independent organization that evaluates charities against multiple transparency and accountability metrics. This reflects our ongoing commitment to being responsible stewards of the support we receive from our community members.
Your support for NumFOCUS during our Year-End Fundraiser will help us reach more benchmarks like these. Between now and December 31, your donation will qualify for a 2x match from several of our generous corporate sponsors. Visit https://numfocus.org/giving-2021 for more information and to make your gift now!
