On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 10:03 PM Joe Harrington <j...@physics.ucf.edu> wrote:
> Hi Ralf, > > The rejection is disappointing, for sure. Some good ammo for next time > might be the recommendations in this report from the US National > Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine: > > http://sites.nationalacademies.org/SSB/CurrentProjects/SSB_178892 > > https://www.nap.edu/read/25217/chapter/1#ii Thanks, very useful! > > You can download a free PDF if you click around and give them an email > address. There is some code on the cover that might raise a smile. > > Lorena Barba, Kelle Cruz, and many other community members contributed, > both as committee members and as white-paper authors. While it's a > report for NASA, the conclusions are strong and there is explicit > support of investment in community resources like numpy, scipy, astropy, > matplotlib, etc. Other agencies are asking similar questions, so I > expect the report to get somewhat of a look at NSF, etc. > > A note on the Academies' process: A consensus study report must only > include statements that no single member of the committee objects to, > and the committee generally only includes senior members or people with > a lot of relevant experience. There were stakeholders from some large > modeling shops for whom openness might be a threat to their business > model, in their eyes, and some of the senior members had never > experienced the open-source environment and had bad experiences sharing > software. This made for an interesting social dynamic, and prevented an > all-out recommendation to forcibly open everything immediately. Given > all that, I was ultimately pleased that we got full agreement on the > recommendations we did make. > > So, some general thoughts on fundraising, not specific to this proposal: > > 1. Try NASA. The Administrator for Space Science, Thomas Zurbuchen, is > pushing "open" very hard, given the success of open data in NASA Earth > Science, and its positive impact on the economy in fields like > agriculture and weather forecasting. He paid for the study above. Many > grant programs specifically solicit proposals for open-source tools. > There are also technology development programs in other parts of NASA > than the Science Mission Directorate. Try contacting Dr. Michael New, > who is Zurbuchen's deputy, and could direct you to appropriate programs. > (Please, let's be coordinated and not all deluge the guy.) > I agree. NASA is the agency that probably understands our importance and needs the best of any agency, and we have a lot of things to point to that are important to them. > 2. As suggested in another message, it's often easier to get support for > a specific, targeted item as part of a big project or institute using > that item, such as LSST or the black-hole group. There's a certain way > to wend into those projects, usually originating from within. STScI has > long devoted programmer resources, for example. > Maybe that is indeed the way to go. The real goal is maintenance/evolution though, so it's a bit of a stretch. The strategy does work, see Dask & Pangeo, however it would be nicer not to have to spend 80-90% of a budget on things we can sell to get the 10-20% of funding for the things we think are most important to do .... > 3. There's such a thing as a share-in-savings contract at NASA, in which > you calculate a savings, such as from avoided costs of licensing IDL or > Matlab, and say you'll develop a replacement for that product that costs > less, in exchange for a portion of the savings. These are rare and few > people know about them, but one presenter to the committee did discuss > them and thought they'd be appropriate. I've always felt that we could > get a chunk of change this way, and was surprised to find that the > approach exists and has a name. About 3 of 4 people I talk to at NASA > have no idea this even exists, though, and I haven't pursued it to its > logical end to see if it's viable. > I've heard of these. Definitely worth looking into. > 4. I mostly lurk here, since being more actively involved in the early > days of numpy docs, I remember, that's what got me involved in the first place - thanks again for that:) so maybe this one has been tried already, or is in > the works. My apologies if so. > No we haven't tried it, perhaps we should. > Think of development as a product to buy. You could put chunks of > development up for sale, advertise them, and coordinate one or more > groups buying them together. For something like an efficiency boost, > you could price it according to the avoided cost of CPU resources for a > project of a given size (e.g., somewhat below the net present value of > avoided future AWS cycles for the projects buying it). It would be like > buying a custom-built data pipeline, except that once you buy it, > everyone gets it. This might mean scoping out a roadmap of > improvements, packaging them into fundable projects with teams ready to > go, pricing them, advertising them to specific customers and in trade > media and shows, and making sales pitches. > This sounds good. It's what I hope places like Quansight Labs (where I just started working) can help with. Same for Ursa Labs (focuses on Apache Arrow, may connect back to Pandas) and Quantstack (xtensor numpy-like C++ lib, a faster conda solver, ...). And with our roadmaps maturing and all projects now being under the NumFOCUS umbrella (except scikit-learn, which has its own nonprofit), this may become a way of the future. Jupyter is already further along this path. We still have some growing up to do though:) > This sounds really weird to us scientists, but it would work just like a > regular purchase for services, which the government and industry are > much more used to doing than donations to open-source projects. > > Don't just sell what the customer is buying, sell in the manner that the > customer likes to buy. > :) Thanks for the feedback Joe! Cheers, Ralf > 5. And, keep trying grant proposals to NSF! > > --jh-- >
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