Hi all, A number of core projects (NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, scikit-learn) got together and put in a proposal to NSF for a large 5 year grant, and it was unfortunately just rejected. We now published the proposal, which may be of interest: https://figshare.com/articles/Mid-Scale_Research_Infrastructure_-_The_Scientific_Python_Ecosystem/8009441 .
Those of you who are on Twitter may already know about this. First mention of this rejection on Twitter with a lot of conversation following: https://twitter.com/amuellerml/status/1117455802598662144. Full quote from Andreas Mueller, replying to a tweet that the first ever image of a black hole was built on Matplotlib, SciPy, NumPy, Pandas, Jupyter, AstroPy: "Slightly ironic that in the same week @NSF rejects a grant to fund the scipy ecosystem saying that working on it is not impactful enough and hiring developers to work on it is too expensive." And a follow-up conversation on Twitter about the rejection: https://twitter.com/amuellerml/status/1118617331058475008 This proposal was led by Columbia, who submitted it together with NumFOCUS and Quansight. It was largely written by Andreas Mueller (scikit-learn, also the PI), Andy Terrel (NumFOCUS) and myself (NumPy/SciPy), with a lot of valuable input from Thomas Caswell (Matplotlib), Jeff Reback (Pandas), Gina Helfrich (NumFOCUS), the other co-PIs, the core teams of the projects, and many others who pitched in ideas and advice. This was the first time we tried a proposal of this scale and ambition (as far as I know), and while it's disappointing that the NSF doesn't seem to value software much (not really news, nor unique to NSF), rejections are a normal part of submitting grant proposals and we now have a much better idea of what it will take to submit further proposals in the future. Which we plan on doing. Cheers, Ralf
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