The NumFOCUS board exists to help ensure that NumFOCUS serves the broader open source scientific and project community. We are a group of volunteers who believe that open source scientific computing has and will continue to change the world. We broadly agree with and will continue to push for additional transparency, a commitment to service excellence, a more robust path to get money from sponsors directly into the hands of projects, and the need for continued and expanded community engagement in how NumFOCUS operates.
In this post, we’ll start with a review of bylaws, cover the role of the NumFOCUS board, provide an introduction to current board members, and lastly reiterate how the board elections have been proposed going forward. If you want to participate in the formation of this updated community-driven election process, please reach out on GitHub.
The Boards role
The role of the board, per our bylaws:
Section 4. Duties
It shall be the duty of the Board to:
a. Perform any and all duties imposed on them collectively or individually by law, by the Articles of Incorporation, or by these bylaws;
b. Appoint and remove, employ and discharge, and, except as otherwise provided in these bylaws, prescribe the duties and fix the compensation, if any, of all officers, agents, and employees of the Corporation;
c. Supervise all officers, agents, and employees of the Corporation to assure that their duties are performed properly;
d. Meet at such times and places as required by these bylaws;
e. Register their email addresses with the Secretary of the Corporation, and notices of meetings emailed to them at such addresses shall be valid notices thereof.
While this is the formal role description, board members do much more. Broadly, the current board is involved in: fundraising, resolving legal issues, resolving CoC issues, providing financial oversight (including approving budgets, audits, and more), setting the strategic direction, ensuring the mission of NumFOCUS is being reflected in all the program we offer, providing committee oversight, reviewing fiscally sponsored projects, being an ambassador for NumFOCUS, and much more.
The commitment is more than bi-weekly meetings; it is often 20+ hours per month with many special projects as needed (CoC, financial issues, fundraising, committee participation, etc). Currently we have 5 board members, with 2 rolling off during the upcoming election cycle, and one former board member who recently resigned due to new employer restrictions having served as on the board since 2018. Here’s a little more on each board member.
Current board members
Logan Kilpatrick: President/Secretary. Logan joined the board in 2021 with Rosie. He was on the small development grant committee, affiliate project selection committee, and served as the Julia programming languages community manager (sponsored project). Logan previously led developer relations at OpenAI, was a community advisor for NASA’s TOPS open science program, and board member of the Django events foundation. He now leads product for Google AI Studio, supports the Gemini API, and is helping develop the Gemma open model ecosystem.
Rosie Pongracz: Treasurer. Rosie joined the board in 2021. She was an active member of the PyData community and Advisory Council prior, for 3 years. Rosie has decades of experience in technical marketing for open source, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, platform companies. She brings insight into how to engage with corporations as well as how to get the NumFOCUS mission and work of the projects more broadly seen.
Larry Gray: Chair. Larry joined the board in 2022. He was an active member of NumFOCUS’ small development grant and affiliate project selection committees. He has volunteered at many PyData conferences. He is a strong advocate for the use of open-source software in education. He is a maintainer for the ML visualization package, Yellowbrick. Larry brings years of experience in managing data science and machine learning engineering teams.
Ex-officio member
Leah Silen: Executive Director, serves as a non-voting member, has been the NumFOCUS executive director since NumFOCUS was founded more than 10 years ago.
Outgoing board members
Outgoing board members are exiting when new board members are elected to fill their seats as part of the upcoming open election.
Sylvain Corlay: Sylvain has served on the NumFOCUS board since he was elected in 2018. He is the CEO of QuantStack, a PyData Paris organizer, and a long time member and leader in the Jupyter community serving in various technical and governance positions.
James Powell: Board Chair. James has served on the NumFOCUS board since he was elected in 2018 and currently serves as the board Chair. James has been a huge contributor to the PyData ecosystems over the last 8 years, attending, speaking at, and organizing many iterations of the conference. He also runs a consulting and education company focused on enabling developers to more effectively build with different ecosystems.
Former board members
Katrina Riehl: Katrina stepped down as NumFOCUS president in April of 2024 and previously served on the NumFOCUS board since she was elected in 2018. She is now part of the advisory committee and will continue to support NumFOCUS and the ecosystem. Katrina has held various leadership positions across Cloudflare, Anaconda, Snowflake, and now Nvidia.
Election process
As highlighted in the February Town Hall, the board elections are now going to be community run, with the creation of a technical and administrative board. Here is the election committee charter which goes into some of the detail in how the election process is being run. Community members can join the election committee to contribute to and guide this new process, with the goal to have the new board members seated around July.
We are incredibly excited to have members of the community join the board and help continue to shape the trajectory of NumFOCUS in a direction that best supports the ecosystem.
Feedback
Broadly, we are always looking for more feedback. Whether on Slack, via email through directors@numfocus.org, or in-person when you see us at events. Please reach out to anyone on the NumFOCUS board or NumFOCUS staff if you ever have questions, suggestions for how we can improve what we do, or just want to chat open source!
We’ll have the next blog post with more details on the upcoming board elections in a couple weeks.
