The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Enabling open code for science at NumFOCUS (Interview)

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

We’re talking with Gina Helfrich the Communications Director for NumFOCUS about their story and history, the impact of open code on science, the difference between sponsored and affiliated projects, corporate backing, the back story of their education and events program PyData, and the struggles of storytelling and fundraising.

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game servers, databases, data mining, or application servers that need to be full duty, 100% CPU all day, every day, then check out Linode's dedicated CPU instances. These instances are fully dedicated and shared with no one else so there's no cpu steal or competing for these resources with other linodes pricing is very competitive and starts out at 30 bucks a month learn more and get started at lino.com slash changelog again lino.com slash changelog All right, welcome back. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog. Regina Helfrich, the communication director for NumFocus, about their story, their history, the impact of open code on science, the difference between sponsored and affiliated projects,

corporate backing, the backstory of their education and events program called PyData, and the struggles of storytelling and fundraising. Let's start out with your role in particular. We're talking about NumFocus, but it's a large organization, a lot of layers to it, open code for science, seems pretty deep. Where can we begin to understand your role and then kind of the origin story of you? Where can we begin here with this conversation on NumFocus? It's a little paradoxical in that Numfocus is a very large organization,

and yet there are only about half a dozen staff at present. Wow. And so we do, each of us, you know, has our official job title or titles, but we all do a lot. So officially, I'm the communications director and the program manager for diversity and inclusion, or NUMFocus. And what that means in practice is that I help to manage a lot of conversations and sort of community engagement, marketing, donor engagement.

I support the projects with things that they need and lots of helping people talk to one another on the communication side. And then doing that in a way that feels inclusive and brings in a diversity of people, communities, and perspectives on the diversity and inclusion side. Well, there's one thing that's reminded us of diversity and inclusion in the world of science, right? Like that's the language of all, you know, it doesn't really matter if it's English or,

you know, Chinese or any language you speak. It's Spanish. Science is a language we can all meet around. I thought that was music, Adam. Music is the universal language. Well, science rooted in math, right? Yeah, mathematics for sure. Right.

I'm being a little bit facetious. Gina, just curious how you came to be at Numfocus and how much of Numfocus's history you have either experienced or been told since it goes back a ways. Can you tell us about your origin story with Numfocus and even just give us a little bit of the background on the organization itself, by the way, a 501c3 nonprofit in the United States. So when we say like official business, big deal, big organization, like that's some red tape to jump through. So y'all have been doing it well. Can you tell us about your history and the organization's history, if you have it? I joined Numfocus in spring, spring, summer of 2015. And at the time, I was essentially employee number two and came in to help Leah Silen who was our founding

executive director and still is our executive director. Leah was with the organization since it began in 2012 so I essentially came on about three years in to help grow and scale. The way that I got there was somewhat stars aligning. I am not a scientist nor a programmer. I started out in. Yes, I started out in academia. I have a PhD in philosophy and women's studies. I did a focus in ethics and social philosophy. After my degree, I spent some time in higher ed administration.

I directed the Women's Center at Harvard. And then for a variety of mostly personal reasons, I thought I would just make a really big change in my life. I moved to Austin. I got a job at a technology startup. I was with them for a year. And then as is want to happen with startups, there was a round of layoffs and I was among them. And from that point, I sort of had a conversation, heard about something that was going on, and then was introduced to Leah. industry experience would serve really well with the needs of NumFocus as an organization and a community because it very much has a foot in both worlds, if you will. I think it's interesting your history into it because it didn't sound like you were apologizing that you weren't a programmer or a scientist, but then Jared said you're a doctor. I think that's kind of interesting how Leah saw that in you, because I can see how you'd be good at being communications and bringing people together. Getting people to that need to talk is often a very hard job.

And sometimes it takes a keen eye or a certain personality. And philosophy, obviously, is a great background to have when connecting people, right? Because, I mean, that's sort of the crux of relationship is that. Maybe. I definitely think that my philosophical background and training has prepared me well to interact with computer scientists because there's i think a a very methodical structured approach to certain kind of problem solving that i can relate to even if the application is somewhat different um i have really enjoyed the work that i've gotten to do at numfocus uh as a translator of sorts. So even, I think one of the really amazing and really cool things about the work that Numfocus supports is that it is highly diverse

in terms of scientific discipline and other applications. Not everything that we do actually falls neatly with into science um but the different types of work that's going on is just so interesting and cool and even though you know someone who is working in physics might be using some of the exact same tools as someone who's working in fluid dynamics or astronomy, they still are coming from really different backgrounds and points of view. And so I get to have a lot of fun helping people to understand one another better. So we know NumFocus is an umbrella

for a bunch of member projects and that you provide services and different things. We'll get into the details. Just to name a few projects for the listeners out there who maybe heard of NumFocus but aren't sure what's all involved, I'll just list off a few that I was well familiar with. Project Jupyter for the Jupyter notebooks,

Matplotlib, Julia, the programming language, Pandas, ROpenSci, there's tons of them. I always in my head associated NumFocus with Python, and of course you've got NumPy, PyMC3, I can search

here by Python, there's a bunch of Python things. Did it start with Python scientific stuff? Because now you have R, you got Julia, there's JavaScript stuff involved. Give us a little bit of where NumFocus began, where its roots are, and then we can learn how it kind of grew into what it is today. You know, as I mentioned, I joined in 2015,

so I was not there at the time. But the history that I've gathered of what happened in broad strokes is that a number of people who were really interested and invested in questions of sustainability for open source projects got together and said we need to find a way to address what we see as a really acute challenge that's coming down the pipe and one of the ways that we want to do this is by founding a non-profit organization to support these projects and those people who were involved most of whom ended up being on the inaugural board of directors happened to be very deeply connected to a variety of python data tools um so like the author of numpy for example so travis oliphant so i think that as i understand it a lot of the early projects that came on were sort of um through those personal connections of the people who were talking to one another and so that meant that it was a lot of python projects but i believe that

we did get some other language projects in still relatively early in the first few years. I think we've had RopenSci for a good long while. But I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what year they joined, for example. And Julia as well, honestly. Very cool. And so the feature-wise, the things that these libraries do as well, I'm just trying to give a profile. If you had to just maybe do it better than I can. If you had to profile a project that would fit inside of NumFocus' umbrella,

maybe it's in there now, maybe it's not. But is science related? That seems like a broad umbrella, but is that the requirement? Like it relates to science somehow? It ends up being something of a family resemblance at this point. Like it relates to science somehow? already have on board um that is not really by language or you know particular feature application but really more to do with is this an open source tool that is being uh you know developed by a and has some kind of important application in a variety of scientific fields, usually. We have some interesting projects that are a little bit of a different type than just your kind of typical software library or package the journal of

open source software for example is a sort of different kind of uh different kind of project in fact some somewhat in line i suppose with our open side that i mentioned um so we have these projects that provide peer review of software and other projects, for example, QuantEcon that do online sort of archives and like reference resources they have a series of kind of a library of notebooks um so it is all really focused on various uh software based largely scientific application you know open source projects gotcha the biggest aspect of support you have is is the fiscal support you also have this list of affiliated projects which if i'm reading correctly are very similar at least in scope or intention and they fit a certain criteria um but they aren't necessarily or they're not so they aren't fiscally supported by numFocus. And I'm seeing a few of these here that I think we've covered. First of all, we did have a conversation, Adam, or I did at least,

back in the original Sustain conference with Karthik Ram about our OpenSci. And so that was very interesting. They're doing cool stuff. Go back and listen to that one. And then SPAC. SPAC is on the list. Our friend Todd Gamlin, who was on Request for Commits, is an affiliated project.

Why the distinction here between the sponsored projects and the affiliated projects? This gets into the technical reasons for being of NumFocus as a nonprofit. One of the really important roles that became clear early on in the existence of NumFocus was that open source projects needed administrative support to help provide and give sort of best practice insight into a lot of what has to go into making a sustainable project. And NumFocus exists to provide that so that the people who are running their projects can focus on the things that they love and do best. In order to accomplish that, we started this fiscal sponsorship program, which is not what it sounds like to any normal person. So fiscal sponsorship sounds like Numfocus has like a big bag of money that it gives out to people. But in fact, that is not the case. That's not how it works. There are many nonprofit organizations in the U.S. that provide fiscal sponsorship.

What it means is that a project enters into a legal contract with Numfocus that effectively makes numfocus the legal entity of the project to get into the weeds of it a little bit there are actually two different flavors of fiscal sponsorship one is the more common which is a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship which is really what i just described we're the legal entity, you know, for all intents and purposes, you know, NumPy is NumFocus, NumFocus is NumPy. And then there are fiscal, fiscally sponsored projects, which have what's called a grantor-grantee sponsorship, which means that NumFocus becomes responsible for the use of grant funds within a project in alignment with its nonprofit purposes. So it's almost more like oversight to ensure that funds are being utilized in accordance with the nonprofit mission.

But the main difference between the sponsored projects and the affiliated projects is, as you said, they look really similar on the face, but affiliated projects don't have any contractual relationship with Numfocus. Whereas sponsored projects, Numfocus is the legal entity for those awards what's the benefit of being an affiliated partner or project we have a few benefits um one most people just want to be associated with the organization and sort of have access to the network of folks. Being a sort of a convening ground, I think is one of the really valuable services that NumFocus ends up providing to the community

and to the maintainers and leaders of these projects. There are also a few more concrete benefits. So NumFocus does have a small development grants program where we make little pots of money available to both our sponsored and affiliated projects in the form of small grants to accomplish all kinds of things that their project might need. So whether that's, you know, paying a developer to build out a new feature or paying for some consulting on how to make their docs more usable

or paying to fly all of the lead developers to a conference where they can get together and have a sprint. There's all kinds of ways that the funds can be used, but only NumFocus-sponsored and affiliated projects are eligible for those. So that's another benefit. So essentially access to your network and events and different things that are available to you.

Because NumFocus is probably bringing a lot of people to the open code and science yard, so to speak. So with that, you want to be affiliated, but you may have your own legal entity or in that grantor-grantee model you mentioned. Right, right. So Scikit-learn might be a good example here. They're an affiliated project, but they have their whole own foundation now. So one thing I'm curious about, just from an end donator perspective, and maybe again, we're just getting into the weeds, but hey, let's just hang out in the weeds and hang out for a minute. When I support Numfocus, so I clicked on the donate button on the website, and it's make

a donation to our 92 supporters recently or something, and i can donate all the details very typical you know choose your frequency choose your donation level this is supporting them focus the umbrella this is does this money go trades that trickle down is this like the ongoing operations because i did find you could check out our other campaigns which seem to be more project focused how does the actual donate work the primary donate button on numfocus if you go to numfocus.org and click the red donate button sends you to a forum where you can contribute to what is essentially our general fund so it could be used in a variety of ways uh the general fund money is what goes to support those small development grants that i just mentioned gotcha the general fund you know might also be used to pay for things like uh printer paper you know this is very it's one

of these things like how do you chase down a specific dollar? It's very difficult, you know, to do. But that being said, the specific donate buttons on any of the pages that talk about the project give you the ability to restrict your money to that project. numfocus.org slash project slash Shogun, you can make a donation to the Shogun machine learning toolbox specifically to be restricted for their use as they see fit. This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse. One of the biggest problems software teams face is having clear expectations set in an environment where everyone can come together to focus on what matters most, and that's creating software and products their customers love. The problem is that software out there trying to solve this problem is either too simple and doesn't provide enough structure, or it's too complex and becomes very overwhelming. Clubhouse solves all these problems. It's the first project management platform for software teams that brings everyone together. It's designed from the ground up to be developer first product in its DNA, but also

simple and intuitive enough that all teams can enjoy using it. With a fast intuitive interface, a simple API, and a robust set of integrations, Clubhouse seamlessly integrates with the tools you use every day and gets out of your way. Learn more and get started at clubhouse.io slash changelog. Our listeners get a bonus two free months after your trial ends. Once again, clubhouse.io slash changelog. So Gina, NumFocus has a lot of different arms or I don't know, tentacles or things that it's doing and different programs. I guess that's a fair enough thing to call them. And we talked about the fiscal sponsorship program. You also have the sustainability program. I would kind of,

I would lump those into similar things, but help us tease them apart and understand what you're trying to do with sustainability program. You're exactly right there's definitely a close relationship there the sustainability program is really the effort that numfocus is spearheading to surface and address sustainability issues among our projects specifically, a lot of what we learn is going to probably have resonance for non-none-focused projects, but the purpose of the program, it's really somewhat focused internally, if that makes sense. So for the past couple of years, we have been getting the leadership of all of our sponsored projects together for a summit to basically have these conversations, understand where things are at, what the needs are, allow folks to sort of do some

peer-to-peer mentoring and understanding how they can learn from one another, and generally just trying to kind of keep building a long-lasting scaffold for the lifetime of these projects. So you've been doing this for a couple of years now. Do you have any key findings or themes that keep popping up that everybody's dealing with or doesn't know how to deal with or fails at? Well, unsurprisingly, we're always talking about money. It's interesting the different flavors of that conversation. And it depends a lot on the specific project and how it's kind of situated and structured. So some projects are really in need of money and they have a very clear idea of what they would do with it.

Some projects are wary of taking money even though they have clear ideas of what they could do with it but they're concerned that it would introduce a bunch of friction and kind of open some cans of worms that they don't really want to deal with necessarily and you know how can some of these larger or more widely used projects uh you know receive back some sliver of the productivity and profit that they have enabled other organizations to create because of the type of open source license that they operate under so if you think for example about the amount of money that someplace like google is probably making because they use our tools it just feels a bit sad that not that much of that money comes back to the projects well they do support the projects it's like on on what ratio you know right so it's interesting because

when i think about scientific projects and this might be an outsider just being naive and wrong, so please correct if I need to be corrected. It seems like in the broad scope of open source, I feel like scientific tooling-related open source projects would have an easier time convincing their benefactors of their monetary value, like their recomp recompense than a lot of other ones because you know a lot of firms have big r&d budgets right i guess academia is a little bit harder in terms of like the availability of funding but there's grant programs all over the

place and it seems like these things are like requirements for success in a lot of the scientific fields and it seems like we invest in scientific fields at large is that just a complete misconception or are there some that are having some success it's a it's a little bit of a i think a nuanced answer we could take i feel like i've talked about numpy a lot answer we could take, I feel like I've talked about NumPy a lot, but we could take them as an example. Certainly there are various corporations that have, you know, essentially paid people to work on the project.

So it's not like NumPy has never received any kind of support to date. But that being said, they just got their first major grant like two years ago, I think. And they have some folks working on it through Berkeley Institute of Data Science bids. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. And some of it is if you're busy maintaining a project,

when do you have time to write a major grant proposal to support the project that you're maintaining? But those are some of the types of challenges that we're trying to untangle through the sustainability program. Do you offer grant writers or support for writing grants? Not yet. It's come up. We're talking about money. Nelton Focus needs money so that we can turn around and use it for those kind of things to make more money, right?

Right. You got to have money to make money. That's what they say out there. You got to have money to make money. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about, too, like from your perspective, Jared, when you were saying, like, you know, where does the money come from? Who donates and whatnot is thinking about the individual projects the maintainers do they end up being independently uh you know independent

open source developers do they tend to be you know working at the googles the netflixes the the larger corporations that tend to you know use this the software do they end up becoming like a sponsor like their time and their maintainership is somewhat sponsored by their their jobs what do you understand what the makeup is to some degree of like let's just say maybe your sponsor projects under maintainership how that yeah i don't have i don't think i have anywhere like a list of who does what. But I do know just sort of offhand that a number of project maintainers are employed in academic institutions. So for example, that is the case for most of the folks who run YT, which was sort of born in astronomy, astrophysics, and actually has a grant

to expand into a variety of other fields. Whereas Panda's maintainers, I believe, are almost all employed by for-profit corporations. Lead developer for matplotlib is at a federal research institution so works for the government effectively so it is a mix but i don't think that there are that many maintainers represented who are sort of independent there's usually they usually have some full-time position somewhere and either they are you know permitted or encouraged to use some of their paid time to work on their project or sometimes that's not the case and they're still doing it in their quote-unquote spare time on a volunteer basis i was just thinking about that from what it says here on your about page. It says our deep expertise and nonprofit administration enables project contributors to focus on what

they care about most. And that assumes, and I was wanting to know like who was maintaining because it says the next, the follow up to that is development and maintenance of the project itself. And that seems to be the case for the most part, right? You want maintainers to be maintaining, but who's maintaining the maintainers? Yeah, well, exactly. That kind of dips into the sustainability,

I'm focused on the money to do these things, grant writers, all these fun ideas. And then the problem of like, well, even if they had money, could they use it? Do they really want it? So in Jared mentioned request for commits earlier, one of the discoveries in that show was that in a lot of cases, money just causes more problems that it actually solves. Yep.

It's definitely really complex. I think we've been having this conversation somewhat recently, even with regard to the small grants program, we got some feedback saying, hey, well, one of the reasons like my project hasn't really applied is because, you know, I can go to my employer and say that I work on this open source project in my spare time. And, you know, they don't have any issues with regard to intellectual property or things like that. But as soon as I'm getting paid for it, that introduces a conflict. So it's easier for me to just not get paid for it. That being said, plenty of projects could happily find ways to spend money if they had it, right? So they could find someone who could come on to work on it full time. I think there is a need for this

money also to help contribute to solving the challenge of a pipeline for maintainers so one of the things that we're really talking a lot about lately is that you could have a lot of folks who are making commits and being active but then there are just a few folks who are really getting to the point of like you know larger pieces of work and then advancing in their knowledge and sophistication around the project to the point that they can be made a core contributor so it's almost like succession planning is a really big challenge for the projects. And I suspect that money would help with that a lot. When I think about money sometimes too, I don't know if you've ever considered this, but this is something that I've, I don't know if this is coining a term or not, Jared,

but I'm going to say this, burden offset, right? So like if you're a maintainer of one of these projects and, you know, as you mentioned, if they clearly have a heart for maintaining and advancing and, you know, whatnot of the project and for whatever uses it may have, but they can't be paid because of just some concerns around that portion of it that they can offset their burden of maintaining it by being able to use some of these grants or the funds that NumFocus can help bring to them to essentially offset their burden of maintaining it, not so much in the code level, but, you know, in adoption. That's one of the core tenets of, you know, open source becoming successful is adoption. And maybe at that level, being a sponsored project, you've already attained that, so you've already surpassed that need. But, you know, further adoption, further education, as you've done with PyData and whatnot, can become that burden offset.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think there's also the case that maybe you're kind of gesturing to this. Projects might get to the point where they realize that they need more people who are part of the core team who are occupied with different types of activities right so um i think some of our more thriving projects um do thrive because they have people specifically whose whole job is to think about these issues and make sure that newbie contributors feel super welcome and happy and you know facilitate that environment that's going to help bring up more people to keep the project afloat and that might

not have anything to do with writing code. So, yeah. You see that a lot with the Linux Foundation, too. Like, even at recent, I was at the KubeCon in Seattle in December. And, you know, I'm aware of this, but it kind of became more clear to me as I was sitting in this press room with the maintainers of Kubernetes and a couple other projects in the CNCF. And I was just thinking like, aside from the maintainers, there's so much more orchestration behind the scenes to make this event even possible to give me and other press affiliates in the room who have a vested interest in the future of software to even be here and be able to have these people's attention to ask

them questions about maintainership and, you know, code quality or, you know, long-term support of Kubernetes or just different things that press have questions about. And I hate even calling us press, Jared, but sadly, that's what we were in the press room. So, you know, whatever. But there's so many people behind the scenes that make open source possible that isn't just maintainers. And it's unfortunate that some maintainers have that the liability of taking money as an issue, but it's understandable. And so there we are. Well, I was just looking at Numfocus itself and Gina, your position and thinking, you know, we started off with saying this is serious business, this is a sustainable nonprofit, this is a big organization.

And part of the reason that we feel that way is y'all have a communications director. And your skill set is wildly different than other people's. We talked about your specific skill set and it's necessary and helpful, bridging gaps between these people and these people and like all the things that you do and those are the things that a sustainable open source project that continues to be successful and grow needs over time and we we had a show

last week with kim creighton and she pointed out that a lot of the stuff around community and inclusion and you know codes of conduct etc like that stuff needs to the stuff around community and inclusion and codes of conduct, et cetera, that stuff needs to happen very early on and start with the starters of the project. But the fact of life is a lot of those projects aren't there. They aren't that. There's one person working on this thing in their spare time, and they need that help.

They need the support structure around them to do things that maybe they either, A, don't have time for, B, don't have the skills for, or C, don't have the desire to do by themselves. And so there's lots of that that has to come in and around to sustain something, even once the money problem has been taken care of. Or the money definitely helps with that problem as well, because if you can't find a volunteer maybe you can find an employee for example absolutely you know like numfocus if you are if once you get to be sort of a certain size or prominence um you're gonna run into like trademark issues and so numfocus handles that for the sponsored projects. Or, you know, you're running a lot of events

or you have some more kind of complex program for your project community. And so now you've got, you know, invoicing that needs to happen and accounts payable and receivable and setting up independent contractors and things along those lines. And so NumFocus handles that.

Or you have a complex question about intellectual property or taxes, NumFocus handles that. So that's really, I think, where the contribution of the organization is. One thing that I do want to call out, just based on what you were describing is that numfocus has not really designed itself or set itself up to be the kind of place that supports a single single developer project or even like you know getting people from just really starting out to kind of getting going and the code of conduct support of that kind of thing. Um, it's, it's really decided or maybe just as virtue of the origins to be an organization that's trying to help projects that already have some legs really get to the next level. And, um andy terrell was i think just at a

meeting the other day where there was a conversation about what it might look like to have an incubator so something that really is like taking in much more early stage projects and and helping them to kind of get set up properly and think about the various aspects that they're going to have to have plans for and kind of structural best practices. But it does not yet exist. It's just a topic of great interest. That's one thing I really appreciate about the CNCF as it relates to cloud-native is that they've provided a landscape, but then at the same time they've got the incubating projects that eventually have the opportunity to reach adoption or critical mass and move into a graduated project scenario and even have more of a maybe a bolded underline name next to the pathway. If you're familiar with this, they have this concept of a landscape, essentially,

of where on the cloud native scale does this project fit. I think that's a pretty interesting thing that they have the incubation process and then this idea of a graduated process that clearly denotes where a project is, but then at the same time provides the same framework that you said, Gina, that NumFocus wants to provide to the budding, the early versions of projects, not simply the ones that kind of have hit a more critical mass. I was just drawing comparisons in my mind as you described that, Gina, to just a startup ecosystem and you got your angel

investors then you got your seed stage and then later stage investors and it's like numfocus is not an angel investor it comes in after you've reached a certain point and it would be cool to have incubators which would be more akin to angel investments and that made me think Adam sweet idea

ready open source shark tank oh think about it let that marinate investments. And that made me think, Adam, sweet idea. Ready? Open source Shark Tank. Oh, think about it. Let that marinate. That could be good. Just come pitch your project idea. Maybe somebody will throw a grant your way. This episode is brought to you by Raygun. Raygun recently launched their application performance monitoring service, APM as it's called. It was built with a developer and DevOps in mind, and they are leading with first class support for.NET apps and also available as an Azure app service. They have plans to support.NET Core followed by Java and Ruby in the very near future. And they've done a ton of competitive research between the current APM providers out there. And where they excel is the level of detail they're surfacing.

New Relic and AppDynamics, for example, are more business business oriented, where Raygun has been built with developers and DevOps in mind. The level of detail it provides in traces allows you to actively solve problems and dramatically boost your team's efficiency when diagnosing problems. Deep dive into root cause with automatic link backs to source for an unbeatable issue resolution workflow. This is awesome. Check it out. Learn more and get started at raygun.com slash APM. So Gina, NumFocus has a large list of donor names, a bunch of individuals supporting NumFocus, supporting NumFocus projects. We see some business names as well, some supporters.

But give us an idea, as far as you know, who all is supporting these projects, who all is using these projects, what does the benefactor, so to speak, look like, and give us some details there. Numfocus gets its revenues in very typical of a nonprofit fashion. So we do have a corporate sponsorship program. These are the good actors who are getting a lot of benefit out of our tools and have decided to turn around and provide their support in turn.

Do you want to give any specific shout outs? Let's see. I don't have them all top of mind but i could shout out our platinum sponsors so for example our platinum sponsors right now i believe are bloomberg and microsoft um and facebook has are Bloomberg and Microsoft. And Facebook has just come on, I believe. They're definitely a sponsor. They might be a plan of sponsor. I can't remember. We're hiring a development director who will memorize these things.

I'll give you some hope. I'm on the sponsors page. You got Bloomberg, Microsoft, IBM. Don't forget about Capital One, Nvidia, Netflix. There's support from the Sloan Foundation and the NVIDIA More Foundation.

Yeah, I'm realizing that we're kind of tipping over into the new year, so some of those might shuffle around. But yeah, there's a bunch of great organizations, corporations, who provide support to NUMFO them focus to advance our mission. So our corporate sponsorship program is definitely a really important part of where our money comes

from. Another important part of where our money comes from is grants from philanthropic organizations um i don't think we have yet achieved a recipient of a federal grant but that's in process hopefully um we we have gotten a lot of wonderful support from the sloan and more foundations over the years so um definitely you, very grateful to them. We sort of do some rolling our own revenues, if the net profit of any PyData conference comes back to Numfocus as a means of funding the organization. And in the early days, that was pretty much the only thing funding the organization. So the relationship between the PyData program and NumFocus is really, really important and has that kind of strong historical context. That's an interesting perspective, too, to think about. I used to be in the nonprofit world, but not in the software nonprofit world, where a lot of nonprofits would find sustainability not just through donors, but being able to offer services to the greater good that would actually be profitable, that would fund themselves. And that's what PodData is to you. Right.

So that's definitely part of it um we want to make sure that we keep those different funding streams fairly balanced though so that it never feels like oh this this is probably data but just make a break you know um so that's it's in the old days that was true but now no longer uh thankfully as the physical sponsor of the projects funding that comes to them through numfocus is also a means of funding the organization so there's something called an admin fee which is basically like a small percentage of that money that goes to pay for the overhead of running the fiscal sponsorship program so you can think of it like if um a company wanted to come in and you know give some money to a specific project like conda forge for example um then num focus as the legal entity of conda forge would accept that money put it in you know earmarked

accounts for not conda, and then a small percentage of those funds would go over into the NUMFocus general fund to pay for all the things that keeps us as a nonprofit up and running. And those things that keep us up and running are also the things that provide the benefits of the fiscal sponsorship program. So to give a concrete example, those admin fees would go into a non-focused budget to pay the salary of our finance manager who spends all day every day doing finances for the projects. So it's, you know, it's all of a piece um and then last and by no means least individual donors so you had mentioned the list of names of people who have supported them focus uh we definitely have hundreds of individuals who have very generously made a donation to the organization mostly because

we just get messages that say how much they love the tools one of the things that i personally feel sort of perplexed and sad about is that uh i i'm reasonably confident that there are millions of people who use num focus tools all around the world and and know that they're using the tool um so it's not like a process on their laptop that's running in the background but you know they have like pip installed map.lib or whatever like they know they're using the tool but they have not yet donated back to support that tooling so you know if you want to use the microsoft office suite you have to pay for it but if you want to use the Microsoft Office suite, you have to pay for it. But if you want to use the, you know, scientific Python ecosystem, it's open source. So you can just find different ways to install it without paying for it, which is great and enables a whole lot of things. But what I would hope is

that for the people who have the means they would donate back right like you can think of it as like paying paying for that open source license that you have just to provide some support to the folks who need it because i think the ratio between those few hundred people who donate to numfocus versus the millions of people who use our tools is not really where I would want it to be. We have a couple of membership programs. You can be a sustaining member of Numfocus where you basically have a recurring donation set up and it's up to you, you know, how much you want that to be. People do five bucks a month. People do, you know, $500 a year. It's just whatever you want. And we have a little over 200 sustaining members now.

And that was probably by and large within the past two years that those folks have come on. And then we also have this idea of a supporting member. So if you make a donation of any size to Numfocus one time in the calendar year, then you're a supporting member. And we usually have, you know, a couple hundred of those. Those donors are incredibly important, not only for the money that they give which typically gets put into the small grant funding for the projects but also just sort of as a representation that the community has the back of the people who are maintaining these projects so to me the more that we see the growth of our individual donors, the more that's going to be a sign that things are moving in the right direction for NumFocus.

Thinking about those long tail of free users who aren't donating back, do you have any strategies or have you tried anything with regards to moving the needle on awareness, education, really converting those into donors? Because if we threw out a number like 5 million, if you had 5 million people using NumFocus umbrella projects in the world, well, a typical freemium SaaS thing is a conversion rate is I think 1%, Adam. I think better than that is pretty good. So even if you had a 1% conversion from the people who use it free, you know, completely open source free, don't ever give back. And then you had a 1% donor conversion rate.

And of course, I'm just assuming 5 million. That's 50,000 people. So you're nowhere even in the order of magnitude of that with your individual donors. It seems like if we could move that needle, it could have huge benefits to all these projects. So have you guys tried anything in terms of reaching those folks somehow and turning them into donors? Yeah, I've tried a lot.

That's kind of been my whole job for a couple of years. Okay. So the failure, I suppose, is partially mine. Oh, come on. It's a hard job. I suppose, is partially mine. Oh, come on. It's a hard job. I think if we can all solve this, I think there would be a lot of prosperity. I like the correlation you draw to SaaS, though, Jared, because there's probably a lot of growth and learning that has happened in SaaS-based software that could be applied to what you're

trying to do, Gina. Yeah, maybe. software that could be applied to what you're trying to do gina yeah me yeah maybe well i mean i i was gonna say i'm on your show and and in being on your show i'm trying to do this very thing which is to reach more users and let them know about numfocus most of the time uh when we do get new donors they are coming with some version of like oh my gosh i had no idea your organization exists i use this stuff all the time you guys are amazing so i think it really is mostly uh like an awareness problem as opposed to people know they just don't want to donate i don't think that's it right i think it's they don't know that they could donate and to whom. So just kind of getting the word out, I think, is a really big one.

And one of the ways that I've been trying to tackle that is to put the put the tools in the hands of the people, which is to say when someone does donate, in addition to saying thanks so much for donating, we might say like, hey, why don't you maybe post to social media and share that you just made this donation so everyone in your network knows what's going on, right? So it's trying to kind of get to it that way. I'm not saying this is the case, but do you think that seeing large brand names as corporate sponsorships could deter individual donors? Because something you said earlier in like I think it was segment one, you were talking about how the Googles of the world, for example, the big four, so to speak, even, are using these tools. And a lot of the money they generate through their services may not be making its way back to i'm just saying that as a sort of rephrasing what you said in the segment one there but i'm curious if you've thought about it from that perspective if maybe individual ownership is is suppressed because of their assumption that well somebody else much bigger than me with much

deeper top pockets than me is benefiting from the software and should be chipping in. I had not considered it in those terms. What has come up in the past is that because some of the tools that we support, particularly widely used in data science um are perceived as being just so so common um that it's sort of incredible for people to think that there is any issue with the sustainability or support that they're receiving right so it's like every every you know intro to data science boot camp is using these tools. So how could there possibly be an issue, right? Like, you've got traction.

It's like, well, yes, but. Well, then the question, too, is then how do you drive the awareness of the need for donation? Because the thing you need to attach to that is a, hey, give us and, hey, support us. And then the follow-up to that is so that. And what you say after so that is the why. Yeah. Right? And as an individual potential donor,

that's the hook that not so much that I need, but it's what pulls at my heartstrings. It's the so that. So that science can prosper. So that we can do these things. And the so that so that science can prosper so that we can do these things and and the so that is is you know numerous blog posts that come out that share the community's effort and triumphs around them focus yeah yeah um this is something that i think about and sometimes struggle with when i'm talking to people you know who have nothing to do with technology they have

no familiarity about my job i said oh what's non-focus um sometimes i say well it's it's a extremely niche non-profit um if you're not really in the know and what we do is incredibly important. And the things that are the most exciting are usually multiple jumps down the line from what we do. So it takes a few steps to connect the work of NumFocus to the really exciting things. It's not such a direct line. And I think that's one of the challenges that we have around this right so if you're you know working for a non-profit that um i don't know is combating domestic violence right you can be like hey we're out there combating domestic violence and everyone's like great that sounds

good maybe it wants that right yeah and and so's not, it's not so straightforward to say like, Hey, numfocus is out there, like, uh, helping to develop cures for cancer or, you know, getting us to Mars or whatever the case may be, because there's just a lot of jumps between here and there, even though that's absolutely true. So, um, it's, it's unsexy work in some ways. Right. Like, well, we're we're helping the project that you use and care about to figure out how to deal with this IP issue. Right. Like that's not very exciting, but it's important. Right. That being said, I think you would do well to tell those stories and maybe do case studies, even if the correlation between this particular num focus project and the end goal of, you know, getting this rover on Mars or whatever it happens to be, whatever is interesting to people, um, isn't a dot to dot line.

But the fact of the matter is that you are enablers. You're enabling these people to do the work that they're doing. And look at how important the work they are is doing now without these projects being supported, you're cutting the legs out from any of these other efforts. I think the case studies, I think telling those stories, whether it's through video, uh, written word or whatever, whatever medium is used, I think would do well to give the why. Because at the current point, and you're in a good spot here on the change log because you're preaching to the choir.

We are open source people. We understand. We donate to projects. Our audience, I'm sure, will go to numfocus.org and I hope will donate. And if you guys do, tell Gina you heard about it or found out about it on the changelog. But to go beyond that is, I think, more difficult. But I think it does require some storytelling. And I think that's what you're kind of calling for,

Adam, isn't it? Give you the why. Yeah. Well, you know, you mentioned YT earlier, for example. So if that's something in astrophysics or something around oceanography, for example, what are some of the recent discoveries that have happened or, you know, phenomenal images of space that we've discovered or how we've been able to, you know, go deeper into the smallest of the small to the biggest of the big, which is what astrophysics is, you know, what are the triumphs in there that YT has played a role in? And even one step further is like, who are the influencers in those spaces that can then also preach the, you know, the YT praises of how it's enabled, you know, these advancements? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's great. Hopefully I'll be able to chase down some really good examples

of that. We had I guess it was like a year and a half or two years ago, we found out that a lot of our tools had been used in the LIGO discovery. Oh yeah, LIGO I believe

is measuring gravitational waves. Yeah, yeah. So we got a nice little bump from that. I'm working on a story. It's way overdue. I'm sorry, Anne, about Anne Carpenter's lab, which has a little tool called cell profiler which is used by thousands of biologists to quantitative quantitatively measure um changes in cells and that work powers a lot of probably really cool stuff, like, you know, working on cures for cancer, the changing shape of cells, as you might imagine. And her tool relies on some NumFocus tooling, right?

So some of the projects that NumFocus supports are deeply foundational tools. So they are the base upon which other tooling is, you know, able to operate. So trying to connect those dots and the more, the more ideas that we can get, I think the better. This is another one of those challenges,

right? It's like, I definitely want to go out and tell that those stories, but it takes a lot of time to chase them down. So if anyone, you know, if any of your listeners are using NumFocus tools for something really cool and interesting that they're doing, and they're like, Hey, I have a great case study for you. Like, please get in touch. Cause I would love to, you know, to talk to you about it. At the same time, we'd love to highlight those things too. So as you have phenomenal case studies or even sub-phenomenal

since I'm using too big of words for that. Any case studies. Just average ones. Just an okay one. Any case studies whatsoever. I love that framing framing This is sub-phenomenal I'm going to start saying that during code reviews There you go Any stories out there that are worth telling I think that's what we really have to shine a light on

Especially As it relates to you already being on the show And having a chance to share More of the future direction Of NumFocus And your achievements and progress We love to be able to focus on that as well a chance to share, you know, more of the future direction of NUMFocus and, you know, your achievements and progress. We love to be able to focus on that as well.

So if you're listening to this and you use a NUMFocus project, please reach out to Gina and tell her or anyone else there your story and how you're using different projects or the projects that they're sponsoring to make science possible. And Gina, we appreciate you coming on the show today and for sharing your time with us. Is there anything else that is anything on the horizon of NumFocus that people are less aware of that you want to make more aware of as we tail off? One of the things that I've been working on more or less since I joined NumFocus is I'm on a mission to make sure that everyone knows that the PyData event and meetup and you know YouTube products are NumFocus organized so

it's happening less often now that people are like oh what's NumFocus? I love PyData. But it still does happen. So now let it be known that PyData and all the wonderful community-driven work that happens under its auspices is organized and supported by NumFocus. And if you go to PyryData.org, you can check out our 2019 events lineup. We've got some confirmed dates

and we've got some sort of like hold roughly this date for this coming year, but there should be a lot of great opportunities to submit proposals. And if you're an experienced person or a newer person there is a place for you in a PyData event. We also are looking for a couple of more US events this year I believe so if you've got a lead on that or your company has space and wants to host, please reach out because that would be great. Let's highlight a couple of these events. Then you've got Pi Data Florence, which is in Italy.

We do have a worldwide audience, so listeners in Italy, check out PiConX. That's May 2019. Amsterdam, London, New Delhi. You mentioned the United States, so we've got Los Angeles and New York City later on this year, Argentina, London, New Delhi. You mentioned the United States, so we got Los Angeles and New York City later on this year. Argentina, Berlin, and Warsaw. So quite a global presence there for PyData as well. And I think calling out the fact that when you register and pay for a PyData event to be a participant, that those funds go to support num focuses yeah it's really important

to mention so if you can either help host as gina just mentioned or attend then that's an easy way to support boom yeah and then in in exchange for attending uh you can come to the NumFocus table and collect your stickers which for a long time when people would say oh you're the sticker people and I'd go yes let me tell you what else we do the sticker people well Gina thanks again for your time today

thank you so much for sharing your portion of the NumFocus story and the greater mission that you all serve and we appreciate the community that you all serve. And we appreciate the community that you serve. And we thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been great.

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soon. Bye. you