Distributions of Moore funds in 2021

[Moritz Günther]

The community suggested 15 distinct projects to be funded with money
from the Moore grant in 2021 [see 1 for details on this funding
opportunity]. With one clear exception, all projects were received
favourably by the community with 5-12 positive votes. The one outlier
proposal with very few votes was removed from consideration.

The total funding requested exceeded the funding available. We made a
list ordered by votes and decided to fund the two top-voted proposals
and proposal PR#186 (because it is the only one that requested funding
set aside for mentoring) in full.
Most of the proposals with 8-9 votes all specified a range in their
funding request, and will be funded at that mean between the minimum and
the maximum given (or 80% of the max if not range was given). In order
to stay within the budget of $264k, all remaining proposals will be
funded at 54% of the requested level, but not less than the minimum
request, for those proposals that explicitly gave a minimum.

We decided on this procedure because it follows the community vote and
also avoids setting a sharp and somewhat arbitrary cut-off between full
funding and no funding between proposals that differ by only a single vote.

See table with approved funding here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17f5d4r3rRzEUXagIvzcSQkJknzGkuUeN4DRClwud08M/edit?usp=sharing
For those of you who will claim payment as part of one of those
projects, congratulations! Next, you need to contact the interim finance
committee at fin...@astropy.org or via slack to let us know if (a) the
money will go as a grant to your employer (e.g. university) or (b) if
you want to be paid as an individual contractor directly by NumFOCUS.

To help improve the funding decision process in the future, we’d like to
hear feedback on the process of proposing, discussing, voting and
allocating money either in public (reply to this email or in
#finance-committee on slack) or in private. One aspect of the Moore
proposal is to develop a fair and open governance structure for the
Astropy Project without burdening contributors with extra bureaucracy.
The Moore grant runs for about one more year and we anticipate a similar
process to allocate these funds within the project in the spring of
2022. Thus, we, as part of the Astropy community, really need to see
what we can learn from the funding process this year. Was it fair? Was
it open? Did it succeed in funding useful contributions that move the
project forward? Will it increase the sustainability of the project?
What can we do to make it better next time?


The interim finance committee also would like to point out that smaller
funding requests will be considered by the interim finance committee on
a rolling basis [2]: If you see a need to pay for something (trip, work
on some issue, mentorship, courses, …) to improve any aspect of the
Astropy project or at least keep the lights on, please contact the
interim finance committee by email or slack. We intend to distribute
most of the available funding through a process like the one we just
went through with broad community input, but we know that sometimes a
funding request just cannot wait that long.

Moritz Günther
(for the interim finance committee)


[1]
https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/blob/master/finance/proposal-calls/Moore_2021.md

[2]
https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/blob/master/finance/funding_requests.md