Funding Community Projects

Hi fellow Julians!

Many of you probably know that the Julia project uses the NumFOCUS, an US non-profit organisation as it’s fiscal sponsor. This means that income for the project is collected in accounts of that organisation, and our expenses are paid though there. The primary source of income is via sponsorship of JuliaCon, although individual sponsorships are now significant as well. Major expenses are again for JuliaCon, as well for our summer-of-code projects.

As a result of careful stewardship over the past few years, we’ve collected a small corpus in these accounts. We’ve funded a few small bounties with that last year. We’re now trying to see if we can do more with those funds.

With that in mind, it is my pleasure so solicit proposals from the community for small development or documentation projects that will enhance the Julia ecosystem. We’re looking for maximum impact, and would prefer projects that can be widely used within the community. We will proiritise specific, achievable projects, rather than open ended research.

We expect to fund around 5-10K USD per project, and we would like those to be achievable by the end of July (ie, by JuliaCon 2021). The deadline for the current round of proposals is next Friday, the 12th of March, end of day anywhere on earth. We’ll let successful proposals know within a week of that date.

We’re doing this as an experiment, and hope of learn from this exercise. As a result we are currently open minded about what can be achieved. If this is useful, and depending on our sponsorship levels for this year’s JuliaCon, we would expect to run this again later in the year.

So if you have an idea for a critical project that you know will benefit the community, but couldn’t pursue due to lack of funding, here’s your opportunity.

Please submit your proposal here, by the 12th of March. And let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Regards

Avik

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A quick reminder to submit your proposals in the next two days. Thanks to everyone who has already submitted.

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As a follow up, I wanted to announce that we are funding the following contributors in this cycle. I’m really excited to see these projects come to fruition.

Panagiótis Georgakópoulos to work on Pluto.jl
Lorenz Ohly to work on FastAI.jl
Rafael Forquet to work on ReTest.jl
Colin Caine to work on the design of package trust solutions.

Thanks to everyone who applied. It is exciting to see the great work happening accross the ecosystem.

Regards

Avik

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