About Numfocus
NumFOCUS: Promoting Open Practices in Research, Data, and Scientific Computing
NumFOCUS is a non-profit organization that aims to promote open practices in research, data, and scientific computing. The organization was founded in 2012 with the mission of supporting open source scientific software projects and fostering a community of contributors around them.
The world of science is rapidly evolving with new discoveries being made every day. However, the tools used to make these discoveries are often proprietary and expensive. This creates a barrier for many researchers who do not have access to these tools or cannot afford them. NumFOCUS aims to break down this barrier by promoting open source software that is freely available for anyone to use.
One of the ways NumFOCUS achieves its mission is through fiscal sponsorship of open source projects. This means that they provide financial support to selected projects so that they can continue developing their software without worrying about funding issues. In addition, NumFOCUS also provides mentorship and guidance to project leaders so that they can build sustainable communities around their projects.
Another way NumFOCUS promotes open practices is through educational programs such as workshops and conferences. These events bring together researchers, developers, and users from different fields who share a common interest in using open source software for scientific computing. By providing a platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration, NumFOCUS helps advance the field of science as a whole.
NumFOCUS has sponsored several successful projects over the years including Pandas (a data analysis library), Matplotlib (a plotting library), Jupyter (an interactive notebook environment), Dask (a parallel computing library), among others. These projects have been widely adopted by researchers across different fields due to their ease-of-use, flexibility, and scalability.
In addition to sponsoring individual projects, NumFOCUS also supports larger initiatives such as Project Jupyter which aims to create an ecosystem of tools for interactive computing across different programming languages. By bringing together experts from different domains under one umbrella project like Project Jupyter or PyData conferences series , NumFocus fosters cross-disciplinary collaborations which lead towards more innovative solutions than any single domain could achieve alone.
NumFocus has become an important player in the world of scientific computing due its commitment towards promoting openness in research practices . Their efforts have helped democratize access to powerful computational tools which were previously only available at high cost or limited availability . With continued support from individuals , organizations ,and governments alike , we can expect even greater strides towards advancing science through collaborative efforts enabled by free & Open Source Software .