Foundation Purposes
teoliphant
incorporation. These are mainly legalese, but an important piece of
what they describe is what the purposes of the organization are.
These purposes must be charitable in order to be granted 501(c)(3)
status. I would like to get feedback on the purposes I have
previously outlined as well as included any additional purposes other
people might find important:
The current list of purposes I have thought about are:
* provide grants for the development of software that advances the
adoption of high-level languages and abstractions in scientific,
technical, and engineering computing.
* commission books and documentation on these activities
* sponsor sprints, tutorials, and conferences
* sponsor students and faculty who have shown an interest in
developing optimized, array-oriented computing
Initially the development should be focused on NumPy, SciPy,
Matplotlib, SciKits, Cython, Sage, IPython, and other packages in the
community (PyCuda, mpi4py, PetSC, PyTrilinos, Fenics, etc.) --- but
the bylaws should allow for other kinds of development if new
abstractions become common.
Doing any of this will require people who have the bandwidth to review
proposals, raise funds, and administer the resources. There may be
limited renumeration available to help do these things --- but it will
not be enough to support a family :-) and therefore will require
someone who doesn't need to make a living doing it. I don't envision
myself, for example, being able to spend full time doing these
activities yet. But, I can assist and advocate.
Thanks for your feedback.
Best regards,
-Travis
Brian Granger
> To incorporate a foundation, there need to be articles of
> incorporation. These are mainly legalese, but an important piece of
> what they describe is what the purposes of the organization are.
>
> These purposes must be charitable in order to be granted 501(c)(3)
> status. I would like to get feedback on the purposes I have
> previously outlined as well as included any additional purposes other
> people might find important:
>
> The current list of purposes I have thought about are:
>
> * provide grants for the development of software that advances the
> adoption of high-level languages and abstractions in scientific,
> technical, and engineering computing.
> * commission books and documentation on these activities
> * sponsor sprints, tutorials, and conferences
> * sponsor students and faculty who have shown an interest in
> developing optimized, array-oriented computing
There is also the fund raising side of things:
* Raise money through donations and grants to support these activities
> Initially the development should be focused on NumPy, SciPy,
> Matplotlib, SciKits, Cython, Sage, IPython, and other packages in the
> community (PyCuda, mpi4py, PetSC, PyTrilinos, Fenics, etc.) --- but
> the bylaws should allow for other kinds of development if new
> abstractions become common.
>
> Doing any of this will require people who have the bandwidth to review
> proposals, raise funds, and administer the resources. There may be
> limited renumeration available to help do these things --- but it will
> not be enough to support a family :-) and therefore will require
> someone who doesn't need to make a living doing it. I don't envision
> myself, for example, being able to spend full time doing these
> activities yet. But, I can assist and advocate.
>
> Thanks for your feedback.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -Travis
>
>
>
>
--
Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgra...@calpoly.edu and elli...@gmail.com
Andy Ray Terrel
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:45 AM, teoliphant <teoli...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> To incorporate a foundation, there need to be articles of
>> incorporation. These are mainly legalese, but an important piece of
>> what they describe is what the purposes of the organization are.
>>
>> These purposes must be charitable in order to be granted 501(c)(3)
>> status. I would like to get feedback on the purposes I have
>> previously outlined as well as included any additional purposes other
>> people might find important:
>>
>> The current list of purposes I have thought about are:
>>
>> * provide grants for the development of software that advances the
>> adoption of high-level languages and abstractions in scientific,
>> technical, and engineering computing.
>> * commission books and documentation on these activities
>> * sponsor sprints, tutorials, and conferences
>> * sponsor students and faculty who have shown an interest in
>> developing optimized, array-oriented computing
>
> There is also the fund raising side of things:
>
> * Raise money through donations and grants to support these activities
These sound great to me!
>
>> Initially the development should be focused on NumPy, SciPy,
>> Matplotlib, SciKits, Cython, Sage, IPython, and other packages in the
>> community (PyCuda, mpi4py, PetSC, PyTrilinos, Fenics, etc.) --- but
>> the bylaws should allow for other kinds of development if new
>> abstractions become common.
I guess I would categorize software projects both on application and
where they lay in the stack. Then try to make sure there is a full
suite of quality high level tools available for many applications.
>>
>> Doing any of this will require people who have the bandwidth to review
>> proposals, raise funds, and administer the resources. There may be
>> limited renumeration available to help do these things --- but it will
>> not be enough to support a family :-) and therefore will require
>> someone who doesn't need to make a living doing it. I don't envision
>> myself, for example, being able to spend full time doing these
>> activities yet. But, I can assist and advocate.
I can't promise any specific amount of time but I'm definitely
interested. I would think getting a good set of tools and community
around those tools to gome together would make a compelling case for
the SI^2 grants from the NSF [0]. I'm not sure which grants the CIG
guys [1] got to get their money but they are in the process of
building their community code. I can find out more about their
process to see if we can follow that same model.
-- Andy
[0] http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503489&org=NSF&sel_org=XCUT&from=fund
[1] http://www.geodynamics.org/
Fernando Perez
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 18:22, Andy Ray Terrel <andy....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't promise any specific amount of time but I'm definitely
> interested. I would think getting a good set of tools and community
> around those tools to gome together would make a compelling case for
> the SI^2 grants from the NSF [0]. I'm not sure which grants the CIG
> guys [1] got to get their money but they are in the process of
> building their community code. I can find out more about their
> process to see if we can follow that same model.
>
> -- Andy
>
> [0] http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503489&org=NSF&sel_org=XCUT&from=fund
We have already started the process for that: attached is a grant
proposal that we submitted this past summer, going for the mid-size
type (SSI). I'm the PI on it, leading from Berkeley with two co-PIs,
and Brian is a PI at Cal Poly, as well as Jonathan Taylor at Stanford.
If we do get it (and it's a long shot), the SSI mechanism is the
right approach to 'incubate' a project that can later morph into an
institute proposal. The institute category hasn't even been opened
yet for submissions, because they want SSI projects to build up some
experience first.
So if we do get the grant, we'd be in a perfect position to show
synergies with the foundation one or two years down the road, in order
to try to 'upgrade' to a institute for open source scientific
computing. Since two out of the three institutions in this one are
Berkeley and Stanford, we'd probably have pretty good credibility for
building something like this in the Bay Area.
I'm attaching the grant proposal in case any of you want to have a
look (some of you have seen it already in the past). We'll hear from
the NSF around December.
Cheers,
f