We are happy to announce the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded a grant to support the onboarding, inclusion, and retention of people from historically marginalized groups on scientific Python projects, and to structurally improve the community dynamics for NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas.

As a part of CZI’s Essential Open Source Software for Science program [1], this Diversity & Inclusion supplemental grant [2] will support the creation of dedicated Contributor Experience Lead positions to identify, document, and implement practices to foster inclusive open-source communities. This project will be led by Melissa Mendonça (NumPy), with additional mentorship and guidance provided by Ralf Gommers (NumPy, SciPy), Hannah Aizenman and Thomas Caswell (Matplotlib), Matt Haberland (SciPy), and Joris Van den Bossche (Pandas).

This is an ambitious project aiming to discover and implement activities that should structurally improve the community dynamics of our projects. By establishing these new cross-project roles, we hope to introduce a new collaboration model to the Scientific Python communities, allowing community-building work within the ecosystem to be done more efficiently and with greater outcomes. We also expect to develop a clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t in our projects to engage and retain new contributors, especially from historically underrepresented groups. Finally, we plan on producing detailed reports on the actions executed, explaining how they have impacted our projects in terms of representation and interaction with our communities.

The two-year project is expected to start by November 2021, and we are excited to see the results from this work! You can read the full proposal in figshare [3] and see this announcement at the NumPy site [4].

Cheers!

- Melissa