[pydotorg-www] [PSF-Board] SciPy India Conference Grant - PSF Board Resolution Notification

Mon Dec 6 03:03:52 CET 2010

Hello Steve,

This seems to have slipped through the net. How about this for a news item:

The PSF is pleased to announce that it is provide a $1250 US grant to 
help fund sprints at the 2010 SciPy India conference to be held in 
Hyderabad between December 13th to the 18th. This year SciPy India has 
over 20 scheduled talks and 30 talks in total which is a 300% increase 
on last year.

Michael Foord

On 23/11/2010 03:38, Steve Holden wrote:
> Prabhu:
>
> I am copying this mail to the web editors list, so that should take care
> of the news item. I am also copying it to Doug Hellmann. Expect to be
> contacted by a member of the blogging team in due course.
>
> regards
>   Steve
>
> On 11/22/2010 12:12 PM, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:
>> Dear Pat and the PSF board,
>>
>> Thank you very much for your generous sponsorship!  I will send the
>> invoice in a couple of days.  A news item and blog post would be great
>> and I will get back on these in a couple of days.  The technical program
>> of the conference is finalized and this year we have over 20 scheduled
>> talks and 30 talks in total which is a whopping 300% increase since last
>> year.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Prabhu
>>
>> On Wednesday 17 November 2010 02:12 AM, Pat Campbell wrote:
>>> Hi Prabhu Ramachandran:
>>> This email notification is being sent to you to inform you of the PSF
>>> Board’s decision to provide funding in the amount of USD 1250 for your
>>> 2010 SciPy India Conference to be held in Hyderabad between December
>>> 13th to the 18th. Please see the following board resolution that was
>>> voted on and passed on November 15, 2010 below:
>>>
>>> RESOLVED, that the PSF provide a $1250 US grant to help fund sprints at
>>> the 2010 SciPy India conference to be held in Hyderabad between December
>>> 13th to the 18th.
>>>
>>> Also, please send an invoice to our Treasurer, Kurt Kaiser, at
>>> kbk at shore.net  <mailto:kbk at shore.net>.
>>>
>>> If you would like a news item on the python.org<http://python.org/>
>>> home page or perhaps a blog entry somewhere, please mail your request to
>>> pydotorg at python.org  <mailto:pydotorg at python.org>.
>>>
>>> Wishing you much success with SciPy India 2010,
>>>
>>> Pat Campbell, Secretary
>>>
>>> Python Software Foundation
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Prabhu Ramachandran
>>> <prabhu at aero.iitb.ac.in  <mailto:prabhu at aero.iitb.ac.in>>  wrote:
>>>
>>>      Dear PSF members,
>>>
>>>      As you know, the SciPy community is a well-established,
>>>      international, and growing group of scientists, engineers,
>>>      mathematicians, and software developers who use Python for
>>>      scientific computing.  Our community has formed around various
>>>      software packages including numpy, scipy, and matplotlib.  In
>>>      addition to these software libraries, our community has also grown
>>>      as a result of several annual conferences.  The first annual SciPy
>>>      conference in the US was held in 2002.  More recently, annual SciPy
>>>      conferences have started in both Europe and India. The first annual
>>>      SciPy India conference was held last year in Kerala (http://scipy.in
>>>      <http://scipy.in/>).
>>>
>>>      This year's SciPy India conference will be held in Hyderabad between
>>>      December 13th to the 18th.  The conference consists of two days of
>>>      talks, three days of a combination of morning tutorials and
>>>      afternoon coding sprints, as well as an additional full day of
>>>      sprints.  The adoption of Python for scientific programming is not
>>>      as wide-spread in India as it is in the US and Europe. Hence, the
>>>      conference focuses heavily on tutorials and coding sprints.
>>>
>>>      Since we are targeting students and faculty for the conference, it
>>>      is essential for us to keep the conference costs as low as possible
>>>      for attendees. To that end, most of the conference costs are covered
>>>      by FOSSEE (http://fossee.in  <http://fossee.in/>).  FOSSEE (Free and
>>>      Open-source Software for Science and Engineering Education) is a
>>>      three-year project to enable the students and faculty of Science and
>>>      Engineering colleges/institutes/universities across India to use
>>>      open source software tools for all their computational needs,
>>>      thereby improving the quality of instruction and learning.  While
>>>      there are a few other open source tools promoted by FOSSEE, Python
>>>      is a major focus.  In addition to this conference, FOSSEE has
>>>      conducted about 20 scientific programming in Python workshops across
>>>      India over the last year alone.
>>>
>>>      Given that many of the attendees will have little or no previous
>>>      experience with Python, the coding sprints will be structured to
>>>      familiarize participants on using Python as well as on how to
>>>      contribute back to the community.  Our plan for the sprints are as
>>>      follows:
>>>
>>>          * Text book companion: as part of this we will take a popular
>>>      math/physics textbook at the undergraduate level and convert all of
>>>      its worked out examples to use Python and Sage
>>>      (http://www.sagemath.org  <http://www.sagemath.org/>).
>>>
>>>          * Working on improving the documentation for various Python
>>>      packages used for scientific computing.
>>>
>>>          * Spoken tutorial translation to local languages:  FOSSEE has
>>>      generated a reasonable amount of content to promote the use of
>>>      Python for scientific computing.  We are currently making this
>>>      material available in the form of screencasts.  They are currently
>>>      in English. We will attempt to translate these into screencasts made
>>>      in a few local languages in order to increase the adoption of Python.
>>>
>>>          * In addition we will have targeted package specific sprints.
>>>
>>>
>>>      To ensure that a large number of students and faculty are able to
>>>      participate in the sprints and tutorials, we are subsidizing the
>>>      housing, travel, food, and registration costs.  In addition, we are
>>>      hosting several central scientific python contributors including
>>>      Perry Greenfield (numarray/numpy), Fernando Perez (ipython), John
>>>      Hunter (matplotlib), and Stefan van der Walt (numpy/scipy).  These
>>>      invited speakers along with the FOSSEE team will focus on directing
>>>      participants to areas they can help, answering questions, and
>>>      reviewing submitted work. We hope to have more than 100 sprint
>>>      participants at various skill levels.  We think this number is
>>>      possible because we plan to combine the tutorials with sprints.  We
>>>      used this model at the Sage Days 25 conference
>>>      (http://fossee.in/sage_days) with a great deal of success.
>>>
>>>      We would like the PSF Board to consider partially sponsoring the
>>>      2010 SciPy India conference.  Specifically, we request $2,500 US to
>>>      sponsor the SciPy India sprints, if possible.  We would use this
>>>      money towards subsidizing the housing and food of the sprint
>>>      participants, and offset venue and travel costs of the invited
>>> speakers.
>>>
>>>      If the PSF provides the sponsorship, we will list the PSF as a
>>>      sponsoring organization on the conference website (http://scipy.in/)
>>>      and recognize the PSF's sponsorship at the  conference sessions.
>>>
>>>      We appreciate your consideration and look forward to partnering with
>>>      the PSF to support this important segment of the Python community.
>>>
>>>      Sincerely,
>>>      Prabhu Ramachandran and Jarrod Millman
>>>      SciPy.in 2010 Conference Chairs
>>>      _______________________________________________
>>>      PSF-Members mailing list
>>>      PSF-Members at python.org  <mailto:PSF-Members at python.org>
>>>      http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psf-members
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Pat Campbell
>>> PSF Administrator/Secretary
>>> patcam at python.org  <mailto:patcam at python.org>
>> _______________________________________________
>> PSF-Board mailing list
>> PSF-Board at python.org
>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psf-board
>>

-- 

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/

READ CAREFULLY. By accepting and reading this email you agree,
on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations
and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements,
licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap,
confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use
policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your
employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in
perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges.
You further represent that you have the authority to release me
from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.