Hi all!
As we are a few weeks out from JuliaCon, I wanted to share news on an initiative discussed at JuliaCon: starting a community fund to provide. The goal of this fund is to support individuals or groups lacking access to traditional computing resources (e.g. internet connection, hardware, etc.) within the Julia Community. These individuals or groups could come a variety of backgrounds (such as from nontraditional or minority groups) and imagined examples of funding opportunities this fund could support are: funding community developers to create and translate and/or maintain resources (e.g documentation, videos, teaching material, etc.), prepaid internet plans for outreach groups, providing hardware/peripherals to classroom type settings, family stipends, etc.
A brief background on this initiative is that after discussions with @miguelraz and @logankilpatrick over the past year, we found we could start this fund through NumFOCUS. Furthermore, up until now there was no means to start this fund. I have decided to start this initiative with an initial endowment of $1000 USD which, although not sustainable, serves as a starting point for this fund and the development of its goals and impact. Currently, I will serve as a kind of “acting chair” for this fund and so far have a few Julia members interested in working on this fund - thanks @kimauth and @NinjaDatum! Immediate next steps here will be formalizing the fund with NumFOCUS.
If you are interested in supporting this fund, please message one of us (Kim, Clayton, or myself) or comment here. Thanks!
~ tcp 