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

Tue Nov 23 04:38:24 CET 2010

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
> 

-- 
Steve Holden           +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
PyCon 2011 Atlanta March 9-17       http://us.pycon.org/
See Python Video!       http://python.mirocommunity.org/
Holden Web LLC                 http://www.holdenweb.com/