Following the success of the 2016 inaugural event, we will again be hosting the NumFOCUS Summit, this time in Austin, Texas, October 10-11, 2017. Last year’s NumFOCUS Summit brought together 23 project representatives, sponsors, board members and friends for the explicit purpose of finding ways we can build a better community. This year we are expecting over twice as many participants!

50 key stakeholders across the NumFOCUS community, including member projects, will gather at the IBM Innovation Center for an intensive strategic planning session. (NumFOCUS thanks IBM, one of our Corporate Partners, for providing this space!)

The 2017 NumFOCUS Summit will take the form of an intensive sustainability workshop led by Christie Koehler, NumFOCUS Projects Director. We have chosen this specific focus for the 2017 Summit in order to help address the pressing challenges facing projects as they seek long-term sustainability. The NumFOCUS Open Source Sustainability Workshop will take place over the course of two days at the NumFOCUS Summit and is a key deliverable of the Sloan Foundation grant that supports the NumFOCUS Sustainability Program.

This year’s Summit and Sustainability Workshop is inspired by the Future Search (FS) method. The title of this FS-inspired workshop is “Ensuring the Sustainability of our Open Source Scientific Computing Communities.”

The purpose of the gathering is three-fold:

To create a shared vision and strategic action plan for addressing sustainability across NumFOCUS and its member projects.

To enable all NumFOCUS stakeholders to act on common ground and take responsibility for their own plans.

To identify ways we can work together on sustainability work that we all value but cannot do alone.

At the conclusion of the Sustainability workshop, we will have created:

a shared history regarding sustainability,

a shared framework that incorporates all our perceptions about present concerns related to sustainability, and

a shared vision for the ensuring the future prosperity of our communities.

Most importantly, this future search will generate strategic action plans for addressing sustainability into 2018 and beyond that involves key NumFOCUS stakeholders.

Workshop materials and action items will become part of an open source sustainability resources toolkit produced as part of the Sloan Foundation sustainability grant. The above items developed by workshop participants will be collected, summarized, anonymized where appropriate, and shared as proceedings of the event. The Projects Director will use the proceedings of the gathering to help set the 2018 Sustainability Program roadmap.

We will post a report on the proceedings and outcomes, including contribution opportunities, to the NumFOCUS blog after the Summit and Sustainability Workshop has concluded.

Be sure you’re subscribed to the NumFOCUS monthly newsletter to be notified when the report and contribution opportunities are published!