Small Development Grants

Small Development Grants is sponsored by NumFOCUS. The Small Development Grants program is a microgrant program benefiting NumFOCUS Sponsored and Affiliated projects. It helps projects fund work such as code development, documentation, website updates, workshops, and educational or diversity initiatives.

Small Development Grants - NumFOCUS The Small Development Grants program is a NumFOCUS microgrant program benefitting our Sponsored and Affiliated projects. The program helps projects fund important work that they might not otherwise be able to do like improving usability, growing project communities, and speeding up the time to major releases. Below you can view a list of work that has been funded under the program .

Interested in supporting Small Development Grants? Small Development Grants Committee The Members of the 2025 Committee: David Pérez-Suárez, Co-chair Smit Lunagariya, Co-chair Call for Proposals Announcement: May 02 Proposal Submission Deadline: June 6 Committee Selection Deadline: Jun 20 Notification to Applicants Deadline: Jul 11 Call for Proposals Announcement: Sept. 19 Proposal Submission Deadline: Oct.

17 Committee Selection Deadline: Oct. 31 Notification to Applicants Deadline: Nov. 21 Any NumFOCUS Fiscally Sponsored or Affiliated project is eligible to submit 1 proposal per grant cycle.

Each project may receive a maximum of 2 grants per calendar year. If a project would like to solicit proposals from its internal community, leaders must organize their own review process to select the proposal submitted on behalf of the project. Proposals may be submitted by residents of any country and work can be performed at any university, institution, or company worldwide (U.S. export laws and sanctions permitting).

Projects will be notified via the NumFOCUS internal project mailing lists that the call for proposals has opened. Applicants will be notified of proposal acceptance or rejection via the email address provided on the application on or before the notification deadline.

Grant funds can be used for: Educational, sustainability, and diversity initiatives Any work that directly benefits the project and/or its community Travel for community members & developers to project events and conferences Proposed work must be achievable within one year. Applications should be submitted via the Small Development Grants Proposal Submission GitHub repository .

Available program funding is determined and approved annually by the NumFOCUS Board of Directors. A portion of the total funding may be allocated for Off-cycle Grants with the remainder divided equally between the three grant cycles. Up to $10,000 can be awarded for each proposal.

Objectives and Deliverables Each proposal should include clear and concise objectives and deliverables. Whenever possible specific timelines should be included. The impact of the proposed work on the project and/or overall scientific computing community should be clearly illustrated.

Each proposal must include a detailed budget justification stating how grant funding will be allocated. As applicable, the following should be included: Hourly rates and number of work hours for contractors Equipment and/or supply costs if applicable Suggested guidelines for word count can be found in the proposal application.

Enough detail should be provided to give reviewers a clear understanding of the proposal’s objective but should not be so lengthy that it puts an undue burden on the evaluation process. Proposal Evaluation Guidelines Proposals will be evaluated and ranked from most impactful to least impactful. If possible, the maximum allocation of funding for each round will be awarded.

Preference should be given to projects that did not receive funding in previous rounds. Preference should be given to proposals that have broader effects i.e. benefit the scientific computing community as a whole. Projects may resubmit the same proposal if it was not funded or was partially funded in a previous round and resubmissions are given preference.

Funding will be dispersed by the finance team directly following the notification to applicants according to established financial procedures and guidelines: For fiscally sponsored projects only , NumFOCUS will deposit the grant funding directly into the project’s account. The project will then submit invoices through the normal channels (i.e. Open Collective) to pay for grant expenses.

Funding dispersement requests must be submitted through the applicable project’s financial request page. Links to request pages can be found here . Anyone invoicing for work done in excess of $600.

00 for a ALL projects must sign an independent contractor agreement with NumFOCUS before billing. Contracts can be initiated by submitting via our independent contractor registration form . NumFOCUS can award the money as a grant or subcontract to a student or postdoc at a university as required (depending on the rules of the university).

NumFOCUS can directly pay for expenses associated with the grant as required (e.g. booking flights on behalf of project leaders to attend a workshop, per diems for travel days) Projects to whom grants have been awarded will be required to submit a report to NumFOCUS describing the work that was performed under the grant and detailing any grant deliverables and outcomes.

Reports will be due no later than three months after the close of the one-year period following the award of funds. Reports must be submitted on the Small Development Grants Report Back Form .

Off-cycle Grants may be awarded to projects outside the established grant cycles if: There is a time-sensitive aspect to the proposal which precludes it from being submitted and/or awarded during one of the established grant cycles The project has not already received the maximum amount of grant funding allowed per project within the calendar year Previously Funded Programs Improving mlpack's visibility via application examples, videos, and documentation HDF5 direct chunking support for PyTables Collocation Methods for Boundary Value Differential-Algebraic Equations Implement support for Common Look-Up Table Format (CLF) to facilitate the creation and exchange of colour transformations Multi-Person Tracking in FreeMoCap Computing Force and Torque with Magpylib Development of Specialized Extensions in PyMC An Animated Video Series Introduction to the GraphBLAS Usability and accessibility improvements to the QtConsole project Dashboard-assisted exploratory analysis of Bayesian models Empowering Aspiring Data Scientists and Encouraging Open Source Contribution in Nigeria through Bokeh Data Visualization Workshops Development and integration of the Spherely library within the Python geospatial ecosystem for processing geographic spatial data Revitalizing the HoloViz Website for Enhanced Learning and Community Engagement Harnessing GPU Power for Quantum Leap in Computational Chemistry: Scaling Electronic Structure Methods with Julia Language Ensuring Compatibility of the mlpack Neural Network Codebase with Bandicoot Laying the groundwork for a NumPy-Financial 2.

0 release Library improvements and a new machine learning templates written with PyTorch-Ignite A Dashboard Interface for Software Peer-Review SciML: Implementing Methods for Exact Model Reduction.

Internationalization and Spanish Translation of Spyder’s Documentation Non-English versions of Stan user guide and language reference pyhf Users and Developers Workshop 2023 Completely revamp mlpack documentation Auto-Differentiable Equadratures Nonvisual Data Science Curriculum and Workshop Series Unified and comprehensive documentation and learning resources for MDAnalysis Lossy codecs for images in Blosc2 Improving the first-time experience of Julia users with Pluto.

jl Expansion of solar irradiance processing capabilities for pvlib-python (resubmission) Improving external completion plugins development support in Spyder Access control improvements for opt-in CI (Continuous Integration) services Rendering LaTeX equations in TARDIS plasma graphs using Bokeh PyTables to leverage the HDF5 enhanced direct chunk capabilities Compiling SciPy’s Fortran packages with LFortran Create a more consistent geometry API through the feature parity between low-level (Shapely) and high-level (GeoPandas) packages Adopting property-based testing in NetworkX Streamlined Special Function Development in SciPy A fast, modern and memory safe solver for mamba & conda!

Enhancing the visualization capabilities of poliastro Commumity building through StanCon 2023 Coverage of expeditures for 2022 developer days – core developers and mentees were invited to travel to London Scoping the future of timeseries data in sunpy Enabling Seamless Geospatial Computing in Julia with GeoInterface Abstract plotting backend interface Jax SMC samplers for PyMC Improving Spyder IDE UX/UI pvlib python jupyterhub tutorial Enable the C-Blosc2 plugin support for python-blosc2 Helping users build workflows with ontological typing Integrating BGV Functionality into OpenFHE Publishing multilingual resources to increase diversity on open source projects Support for TARDIS Con 2022 Add advanced transparency support in napari by adding two-pass rendering to VisPy Redesigning and Improving Cantera’s Website Adding pyproject.

toml support to grayskull Improving the organization and content of MDAnalysis teaching materials Faster Random Variate Sampling from SciPy Statistical Distributions PyTables to leverage the HDF5 enhanced direct chunk capabilities Merging of the new SymPy plotting module and further usability improvements Compiling SciPy with LFortran Make python-blosc2 to leverage most of the new capabilities in C-Blosc2 Advancing Julia Outreach and Community Efforts (Re-applying from last round, updated per committee feedback) Integrating BGV Functionality into PALISADE Developer Training Programs for Taskflow Modernize the CVXPY web documentation and make it interactive Linear algebra kernel for volesti Make Julia's deep learning ecosystem interoperable with Python models Utilities for internationalization of f-strings Introducing Users to Powerful New Features of SciPy Adding complex number support to JuMP Improving the Spyder IDE installation experience Make WGLMakie a first-class Makie backend Interactive documentation for TARDIS Leveraging the S2 library for processing geographic spatial data in Python Backend switch to PyTorch Developing accessible training modules for new and intermediate Canter users A set of Jupyter notebooks for metabolic network analysis Updating conda-forge compiler infrastructure Converting MathJax's speech solution to Typescript Add PROPACK Sparse SVD to SciPy Interactive documentation for TARDIS A new plugin system for Blosc2 Taskflow-San: Sanitizing Erroneous Control Flow in Taskflow Graphs Atomic data infrastructure for TARDIS Sustained Community Engagement and Automated Metrics for Community Health Analytics Scaling GeoPandas with Dask: improved IO for supporting large geospatial data Improving LFortran to compile stdlib and fpm Add parallel implementations in volesti using several C++ methods for parallelism Library improvements and Semi-Supervised Learning toolkit development.

Standard GPU Algorithms with Task Graph Parallelism Pandas, Matplotlib, Bokeh, Project Jupyter, NetworkX, scikit-image Streamlining, modernizing, and improving accessibility for the PyData Sphinx Theme.

Fine tuning the Bayesian Additive Regression Trees implementation in PyMC3 Add Scientific Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tools and Tutorials to the SciML Organization in Julia Improving SymPy plotting capabilities Improving LFortran to Generate Optimized Code The first release of software package dingo Machine Learning documentation improvements for Julia Array types for scaling poliastro mlpack – ensmallen – Initial GPU support via Bandicoot Rewrite and expand Bokeh’s tutorial notebooks with a focus on readability A Mixed Integer Programming Solver for SciPy Support for zfp, a lossy codec for floating point data in Blosc2/Caterva GNU Radio Tutorials Revamp PV ❤️ Storage (adding storage support to pvlib) IPython maintenance and future proofing Periodic boundary handling and on the fly transformations Student Project Integration In Support of PALISADE Improving documentation generation for Julia and its packages Building a better base for the geospatial Python stack: vectorized geometric operations & Shapely 2.

0 Improved Performance Benchmarking for pandas Improving accessibility and usability for nteract desktop app Improving and expanding the implementation of Approximate Bayesian Computation Hyperparameter tuning with Shogun Docker images for the Open Journals processing pipeline Extend InferenceData capabilities Distributed scheduling with MLJ Improving boundary handling and data type support in scipy.

ndimage Text Add-on Video Tutorials Improve the sustainability and modularity of Solcore mlpack – Interactive Machine Learning Notebooks And Documentation Improvement and modernization of GeoPandas documentation Making rOpenSci Community Engagement More Sustainable Upgrading SymPy Gamma’s infrastructure to support Python 3 and latest SymPy Improving Shogun’s build script generator TARDIS Continuous Integration reference data improvements Theme improvements for Jupyter Book Adding first class support to SunPy for co-aligning images Funding for improving nteract documentation Add messaging functionality to conda and conda-build ITK Python Documentation Expansion New validation framework for poliastro Advancing the state of Cython 3.

0 Building Engagement through a new Community Call – Virtual Hackathon Model Visibility and communications improvements mlpack for the Internet of Things and embedded devices Hosted mac-mini for testing OSX-specific bugs Travel grants to support researchers and contributors to attend FEniCS Conference 2020 Create educational material and give workshops related to exploratory analysis of Bayesian models with ArviZ Improving and modernizing the introductory “Getting Started” pages of the pandas documentation JuliaImages developer meeting Organize Gensim Documentation & Improve Discovery SciPy Development Documentation Overhaul The 4th Annual Kinetics Code Conference Cantera Packaging and CI Infrastructure Upgrades Complete the SciPy special functions documentation Creating the ultimate terminal experience in Spyder with Spyder-terminal Developing Spectroscopic Reduction Tools Document Blosc2 frame format and freeze API Websocket Optimization for Tornado (for Bokeh) Content and design improvements to the Spyder documentation Create an open online rOpenSci Community Contributing Guide Encourage contributors from minority groups to lead efforts in improving pandas documentation Enhanced LAPACK Support in SciPy Improved Dyslexia Support via Fine Grained Synchronized Highlighting Unified Recipe Regenerator Shogun Developer Meeting, Berlin Fully integrate new parameter framework, unify API/interfaces, and release Shogun 7.

0. Improving the Usability of SunPy’s Data Downloader Modern user-friendly documentation Modernize, Reorganize, and Update Cantera’s Documentation Spyder 4: Making the Scientific Python Development Environment even better (Sheehan Olver) BlockBandedMatrices.

jl: add support for general array backends (GPU) Improving Documentation, Examples, and Tutorials Maturing a sparse array implementation for SciPy MDAnalysis tutorial and hackathon Probability Plots and Generalized Additive Models (finish stalled pull requests) Shogun website and UX redesign Adding compatibility with user-defined Python models An Efficient, High-Level Implementation of Linear Programming Better support for native HDF5 files conda-forge sprint at SciPy 2019 MatchPy C++ code generator for SymPy/symengine.

Multi-Dimensional Bisection Method for finding the roots of non-linear implicit equation systems Open Journals website update The 3rd Annual Kinetics Code Conference: Charting near- and long-term directions for Cantera software development Travel grants to FEniCS Conference 2017 to encourage the transition from user to regular contributor h5py backend for PyTables SymPy 1.

1 Release Support Text Analytics Introductory Course for Social Scientists Widening platform availability for MDAnalysis: Full Python 3 Support AMS Short Course on Open Source Radar Software “This is an excellent way for NumFOCUS to help the development of its projects — thanks for running it!

” —SunPy, NumFOCUS Sponsored Project “The amount of time we have to wait to bring pandas2 to the public is directly correlated to the amount of funds we have for developer time. ” —Jeff Reback, pandas Lead Developer NumFOCUS Sponsored Projects 2026 — This site is powered by Netlify