Small Development Grants

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 Small Development Grants Committee is a volunteer committee established by the NumFOCUS Board of Directors to help facilitate the Small Development Grants program. You can read more about the committee’s role and responsibilities in the charter.

The Members of the 2024 Committee:

Bryan Weber, Co-chair

David Pérez-Suárez, Co-chair

Brian Skinn

Mridul Seth

Pamphile Roy

Pramod Misra

Jelena Milosevic

Magdelena Wiercioch

Robert Coup

Ashley Pace

Sarah Kaiser

Kalyan Prasad

Sophia Yang

Lilith Hafner

Nizam Uddin Syed

Smit Lunagariya

Past Committee Members :

Larry Gray

Tim Hoffmann

Alejandro Oliva

Bradly Alicea

Marcel Haas

Paige Bailey

Luke Canavan

How to Join

If you are interested in serving on the committee you should subscribe to the NumFOCUS newsletter. Requests for applications are sent out each January via the newsletter.

2024 Funding Rounds

2024 Funding Rounds

 

Round 1

  • Call for Proposals Announcement: February 2, 2024
  • Proposal Submission Deadline: March 1, 2024
  • Committee Selection Deadline: March 22, 2024
  • Notification to Applicants Deadline: April 12, 2024

Round 2

  • Call for Proposals Announcement: May 3, 2024
  • Proposal Submission Deadline: May 31, 2024
  • Committee Selection Deadline: June 14, 2024
  • Notification to Applicants Deadline: July 12, 2024

Round 3

  • Call for Proposals Announcement: August 12, 2024​
  • Proposal Submission Deadline: September 30, 2024
  • Committee Selection Deadline: October 14, 2024
  • Notification to Applicants Deadline: November 11, 2024
Eligibility

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.

Usage of Funds

Grant funds can be used for: 

  • Code development 
  • Documentation 
  • Website updates 
  • Workshops and sprints
  • 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.

Proposal Guidelines

Applications should be submitted via the Small Development Grants Proposal Submission Form. A doc with the application questions can be downloaded here

Available Funding

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.

Budget

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
  • Cost of any services
  • Travel costs
Proposal Length

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 Distribution

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)
Reporting

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

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

Project
Proposal Title
Amount
Year
Round
mlpack Improving mlpack's visibility via application examples, videos, and documentation $10,000.00 2024 1
PyTables HDF5 direct chunking support for PyTables $10,000.00 2024 1
SciML Collocation Methods for Boundary Value Differential-Algebraic Equations $8,000.00 2024 1
Colour Implement support for Common Look-Up Table Format (CLF) to facilitate the creation and exchange of colour transformations $9,000.00 2024 1
Freemocap Multi-Person Tracking in FreeMoCap $5,000.00 2024 1
Magpylib Computing Force and Torque with Magpylib $10,000.00 2024 1
PyMC Development of Specialized Extensions in PyMC $10,000.00 2024 1
python-graphblas An Animated Video Series Introduction to the GraphBLAS $10,000.00 2024 1
Spyder Usability and accessibility improvements to the QtConsole project $8,610.00 2024 1
ArviZ Dashboard-assisted exploratory analysis of Bayesian models $10,000.00 2023 3
Bokeh Empowering Aspiring Data Scientists and Encouraging Open Source Contribution in Nigeria through Bokeh Data Visualization Workshops $7,500.00 2023 3
GeoPandas Development and integration of the Spherely library within the Python geospatial ecosystem for processing geographic spatial data $10,000.00 2023 3
HoloViz Revitalizing the HoloViz Website for Enhanced Learning and Community Engagement $10,000.00 2023 3
Julia Harnessing GPU Power for Quantum Leap in Computational Chemistry: Scaling Electronic Structure Methods with Julia Language $10,000.00 2023 3
mlpack Ensuring Compatibility of the mlpack Neural Network Codebase with Bandicoot $5,000.00 2023 3
NumPy Laying the groundwork for a NumPy-Financial 2.0 release $6,120.00 2023 3
PyTorch-Ignite Library improvements and a new machine learning templates written with PyTorch-Ignite $2,500.00 2023 3
rOpenSci A Dashboard Interface for Software Peer-Review $9,962.00 2023 3
SciML SciML: Implementing Methods for Exact Model Reduction. $8,400.00 2023 3
Spyder Internationalization and Spanish Translation of Spyder’s Documentation $6,300.00 2023 3
Stan Non-English versions of Stan user guide and language reference $10,000.00 2023 3
pyhf pyhf Users and Developers Workshop 2023 $10,000.00 2023 2
mlpack Completely revamp mlpack documentation $10,000.00 2023 2
equadratures Auto-Differentiable Equadratures $10,000.00 2023 2
pandas Nonvisual Data Science Curriculum and Workshop Series $7,345.00 2023 2
MDAnalysis Unified and comprehensive documentation and learning resources for MDAnalysis $10,000.00 2023 2
Blosc Lossy codecs for images in Blosc2 $9,750.00 2023 2
Mesa Python Front End $5,400.00 2023 2
Julia Improving the first-time experience of Julia users with Pluto.jl $10,000.00 2023 2
pvlib Expansion of solar irradiance processing capabilities for pvlib-python (resubmission) $10,000.00 2023 2
Spyder Improving external completion plugins development support in Spyder $8,190.00 2023 1
conda-forge Access control improvements for opt-in CI (Continuous Integration) services $10,000.00 2023 1
Bokeh Rendering LaTeX equations in TARDIS plasma graphs using Bokeh $10,000.00 2023 1
PyTables PyTables to leverage the HDF5 enhanced direct chunk capabilities $9,500.00 2023 1
LFortran Compiling SciPy’s Fortran packages with LFortran $10,000.00 2023 1
GeoPandas Create a more consistent geometry API through the feature parity between low-level (Shapely) and high-level (GeoPandas) packages $8,000.00 2023 1
NetworkX Adopting property-based testing in NetworkX $3,550.00 2023 1
SciPy Streamlined Special Function Development in SciPy $10,000.00 2023 1
conda A fast, modern and memory safe solver for mamba & conda! $8,000.00 2023 1
poliastro Enhancing the visualization capabilities of poliastro $4,500.00 2023 1
Stan Commumity building through StanCon 2023 $10,000.00 2023 1
sktime Coverage of expeditures for 2022 developer days – core developers and mentees were invited to travel to London $5,000.00 2022 3
SunPy Scoping the future of timeseries data in sunpy $5,250.00 2022 3
Julia Enabling Seamless Geospatial Computing in Julia with GeoInterface $10,000.00 2022 3
ArviZ Abstract plotting backend interface $10,000.00 2022 3
PyMC Jax SMC samplers for PyMC $10,000.00 2022 3
Spyder Improving Spyder IDE UX/UI $8,190.00 2022 3
pvlib pvlib python jupyterhub tutorial $250.00 2022 3
Blosc Enable the C-Blosc2 plugin support for python-blosc2 $6,250.00 2022 3
pyiron Helping users build workflows with ontological typing $6,000.00 2022 3
PALISADE Integrating BGV Functionality into OpenFHE $10,000.00 2022 3
rOpenSci Publishing multilingual resources to increase diversity on open source projects $10,000.00 2022 3
TARDIS Support for TARDIS Con 2022 $2,300.00 2022 2
napari Add advanced transparency support in napari by adding two-pass rendering to VisPy $4,600.00 2022 2
Cantera Redesigning and Improving Cantera’s Website $4,600.00 2022 2
conda-forge Adding pyproject.toml support to grayskull $2,700.00 2022 2
MDAnalysis Improving the organization and content of MDAnalysis teaching materials $4,600.00 2022 2
SciPy Faster Random Variate Sampling from SciPy Statistical Distributions $4,100.00 2022 2
PyTables PyTables to leverage the HDF5 enhanced direct chunk capabilities $4,300.00 2022 2
SymPy Merging of the new SymPy plotting module and further usability improvements $2,300.00 2022 2
LFortran Compiling SciPy with LFortran $4,600.00 2022 2
Blosc Make python-blosc2 to leverage most of the new capabilities in C-Blosc2 $4,100.00 2022 2
Julia Advancing Julia Outreach and Community Efforts (Re-applying from last round, updated per committee feedback) $4,600.00 2022 2
PALISADE Integrating BGV Functionality into PALISADE $4,600.00 2022 2
QuTiP QuTiP 5 Sprint $2,700.00 2022 2
Taskflow Developer Training Programs for Taskflow $4,600.00 2022 2
CVXPY Modernize the CVXPY web documentation and make it interactive $4,000.00 2022 2
GeomScale Linear algebra kernel for volesti $4,600.00 2022 2
FluxML Make Julia's deep learning ecosystem interoperable with Python models $4,400.00 2022 2
Orange Utilities for internationalization of f-strings $3,700.00 2022 2
SciPy Introducing Users to Powerful New Features of SciPy $5,000.00 2022 1
JuMP Adding complex number support to JuMP $8,600.00 2022 1
Spyder Improving the Spyder IDE installation experience $7,800.00 2022 1
FluxML Make WGLMakie a first-class Makie backend $10,000.00 2022 1
TARDIS Interactive documentation for TARDIS $3,000.00 2022 1
GeoPandas Leveraging the S2 library for processing geographic spatial data in Python $10,000.00 2022 1
pomegranate Backend switch to PyTorch $10,000.00 2022 1
Cantera Developing accessible training modules for new and intermediate Canter users $2,231.00 2021 1
GeomScale A set of Jupyter notebooks for metabolic network analysis $5,000.00 2021 1
conda-forge Updating conda-forge compiler infrastructure $5,000.00 2021 1
MathJax Converting MathJax's speech solution to Typescript $4,400.00 2021 1
SciPy Add PROPACK Sparse SVD to SciPy $3,550.00 2021 1
TARDIS Interactive documentation for TARDIS $2,500.00 2021 1
Blosc A new plugin system for Blosc2 $5,000.00 2021 1
Orange Data Science Textbook $3,000.00 2021 1
Taskflow Taskflow-San: Sanitizing Erroneous Control Flow in Taskflow Graphs $5,000.00 2021 1
TARDIS Atomic data infrastructure for TARDIS $5,000.00 2021 2
rOpenSci Sustained Community Engagement and Automated Metrics for Community Health Analytics $5,000.00 2021 2
GeoPandas Scaling GeoPandas with Dask: improved IO for supporting large geospatial data $5,000.00 2021 2
LFortran Improving LFortran to compile stdlib and fpm $2,400.00 2021 2
GeomScale Add parallel implementations in volesti using several C++ methods for parallelism $5,000.00 2021 2
Stan Update mc-stan.org $4,800.00 2021 2
PyTorch-Ignite Library improvements and Semi-Supervised Learning toolkit development. $5,000.00 2021 2
Taskflow Standard GPU Algorithms with Task Graph Parallelism $5,000.00 2021 2
NumPy, Scipy,
Pandas, Matplotlib, Bokeh, Project Jupyter, NetworkX, scikit-image
Streamlining, modernizing, and improving accessibility for the PyData Sphinx Theme. $25,000.00 2021 2
ITK Insight Journal $3,520.00 2021 2
PyMC Fine tuning the Bayesian Additive Regression Trees implementation in PyMC3 $5,000.00 2021 2
SciML Add Scientific Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tools and Tutorials to the SciML Organization in Julia $4,250.00 2021 2
SymPy Improving SymPy plotting capabilities $5,000.00 2021 2
LFortran Improving LFortran to Generate Optimized Code $5,000.00 2021 3
GeomScale The first release of software package dingo $5,000.00 2021 3
Julia Machine Learning documentation improvements for Julia $5,000.00 2021 3
poliastro Array types for scaling poliastro $5,000.00 2021 3
mlpack mlpack – ensmallen – Initial GPU support via Bandicoot $4,765.00 2021 3
Bokeh Rewrite and expand Bokeh’s tutorial notebooks with a focus on readability $5,000.00 2021 3
SciPy A Mixed Integer Programming Solver for SciPy $4,985.00 2021 3
Blosc Support for zfp, a lossy codec for floating point data in Blosc2/Caterva $5,000.00 2021 3
GNU Radio GNU Radio Tutorials Revamp $4,800.00 2021 3
pvlib PV ❤️ Storage (adding storage support to pvlib) $5,000.00 2021 3
Jupyter/IPython IPython maintenance and future proofing $4,800.00 2021 3
MDAnalysis Periodic boundary handling and on the fly transformations $5,000.00 2020 1
PALISADE Student Project Integration In Support of PALISADE $5,000.00 2020 1
Effective Quadratures Web presence funding $800.00 2020 1
Julia Improving documentation generation for Julia and its packages $5,000.00 2020 1
GeoPandas Building a better base for the geospatial Python stack: vectorized geometric operations & Shapely 2.0 $5,000.00 2020 1
pandas Improved Performance Benchmarking for pandas $5,000.00 2020 1
nteract Improving accessibility and usability for nteract desktop app $5,000.00 2020 1
PyMC Improving and expanding the implementation of Approximate Bayesian Computation $5,000.00 2020 1
Shogun Hyperparameter tuning with Shogun $4,200.00 2020 1
Open Journals Docker images for the Open Journals processing pipeline $4,000.00 2020 1
ArviZ Extend InferenceData capabilities $1,000.00 2020 1
Julia Distributed scheduling with MLJ $5,000.00 2020 2
SciPy Improving boundary handling and data type support in scipy.ndimage $5,000.00 2020 2
Orange Text Add-on Video Tutorials $4,000.00 2020 2
Solcore Improve the sustainability and modularity of Solcore $5,000.00 2020 2
mlpack mlpack – Interactive Machine Learning Notebooks And Documentation $5,000.00 2020 2
GeoPandas Improvement and modernization of GeoPandas documentation $5,000.00 2020 2
rOpenSci Making rOpenSci Community Engagement More Sustainable $5,000.00 2020 2
SymPy Upgrading SymPy Gamma’s infrastructure to support Python 3 and latest SymPy $3,000.00 2020 2
Chainer Chinese documentation $3,000.00 2020 2
Shogun Improving Shogun’s build script generator $5,000.00 2020 2
TARDIS TARDIS Continuous Integration reference data improvements $2,000.00 2020 3
QuantEcon Theme improvements for Jupyter Book $4,975.00 2020 3
SunPy Adding first class support to SunPy for co-aligning images $5,000.00 2020 3
nteract Funding for improving nteract documentation $5,000.00 2020 3
conda-forge Add messaging functionality to conda and conda-build $5,000.00 2020 3
ITK ITK Python Documentation Expansion $3,500.00 2020 3
poliastro New validation framework for poliastro $3,000.00 2020 3
Cython Advancing the state of Cython 3.0 $5,000.00 2020 3
rOpenSci Building Engagement through a new Community Call – Virtual Hackathon Model $5,000.00 2020 3
PyTorch-Ignite Visibility and communications improvements $5,000.00 2020 3
Gensim Modernize Gensim Website $3,500.00 2020 Off-cycle
mlpack mlpack for the Internet of Things and embedded devices $5,000.00 2020 Off-cycle
Matplotlib Hosted mac-mini for testing OSX-specific bugs $3,000.00 2020 Off-cycle
FEniCS Travel grants to support researchers and contributors to attend FEniCS Conference 2020 $2,400.00 2020 Off-cycle
ArviZ Create educational material and give workshops related to exploratory analysis of Bayesian models with ArviZ $2,500.00 2019 1
pandas Improving and modernizing the introductory “Getting Started” pages of the pandas documentation $5,000.00 2019 1
Julia JuliaImages developer meeting $4,000.00 2019 1
Gensim Organize Gensim Documentation & Improve Discovery $5,000.00 2019 1
SciPy SciPy Development Documentation Overhaul $4,274.00 2019 1
Cantera The 4th Annual Kinetics Code Conference $4,000.00 2019 1
Cantera Cantera Packaging and CI Infrastructure Upgrades $2,500.00 2019 2
SciPy Complete the SciPy special functions documentation $2,500.00 2019 2
Spyder Creating the ultimate terminal experience in Spyder with Spyder-terminal $4,800.00 2019 2
Astropy Developing Spectroscopic Reduction Tools $5,000.00 2019 2
Blosc Document Blosc2 frame format and freeze API $5,000.00 2019 2
SymPy Expanding ODE Module $3,000.00 2019 2
Bokeh Websocket Optimization for Tornado (for Bokeh) $2,500.00 2019 2
Spyder Content and design improvements to the Spyder documentation $1,820.00 2019 3
rOpenSci Create an open online rOpenSci Community Contributing Guide $3,000.00 2019 3
pandas Encourage contributors from minority groups to lead efforts in improving pandas documentation $3,000.00 2019 3
SciPy Enhanced LAPACK Support in SciPy $4,978.00 2019 3
MathJax Improved Dyslexia Support via Fine Grained Synchronized Highlighting $4,688.00 2019 3
Matplotlib Matplotlib Cheatsheets $5,000.00 2019 3
conda-forge Unified Recipe Regenerator $3,750.00 2019 3
Shogun Shogun Developer Meeting, Berlin $4,000.00 2019 Off-cycle
Shogun Fully integrate new parameter framework, unify API/interfaces, and release Shogun 7.0. $1,500.00 2018 1
Orange Data Mining Girls go Data Mining $3,000.00 2018 1
SunPy Improving the Usability of SunPy’s Data Downloader $3,000.00 2018 1
Gensim Modern user-friendly documentation $3,000.00 2018 1
Cantera Modernize, Reorganize, and Update Cantera’s Documentation $3,000.00 2018 1
Spyder Spyder 4: Making the Scientific Python Development Environment even better $3,000.00 2018 1
Julia (Sheehan Olver) BlockBandedMatrices.jl: add support for general array backends (GPU) $3,000.00 2018 2
Bokeh Bokeh Docs Modernization $3,000.00 2018 2
Pomegranate Improving Documentation, Examples, and Tutorials $3,000.00 2018 2
SciPy Maturing a sparse array implementation for SciPy $3,000.00 2018 2
MDAnalysis MDAnalysis tutorial and hackathon $2,500.00 2018 2
Statsmodels Probability Plots and Generalized Additive Models (finish stalled pull requests) $3,000.00 2018 2
Shogun Shogun website and UX redesign $2,500.00 2018 2
pomegranate Adding compatibility with user-defined Python models $3,000.00 2018 3
SciPy An Efficient, High-Level Implementation of Linear Programming $2,000.00 2018 3
PyTables Better support for native HDF5 files $3,000.00 2018 3
conda-forge conda-forge sprint at SciPy 2019 $3,000.00 2018 3
Gensim FastText tutorials $3,000.00 2018 3
SymPy MatchPy C++ code generator for SymPy/symengine. $3,000.00 2018 3
Julia Multi-Dimensional Bisection Method for finding the roots of non-linear implicit equation systems $3,000.00 2018 3
Open Journals Open Journals website update $2,800.00 2018 3
Cantera The 3rd Annual Kinetics Code Conference: Charting near- and long-term directions for Cantera software development $3,000.00 2018 3
FEniCS Travel grants to FEniCS Conference 2017 to encourage the transition from user to regular contributor $2,400.00 2017 1
PyTables h5py backend for PyTables $3,000.00 2017 1
NumExpr NumExpr-3.0 Beta $3,000.00 2017 1
SymPy SymPy 1.1 Release Support $3,000.00 2017 1
Orange Text Analytics Introductory Course for Social Scientists $1,750.00 2017 1
MDAnalysis Widening platform availability for MDAnalysis: Full Python 3 Support $1,500.00 2017 1
AMS Organization AMS Short Course on Open Source Radar Software $1,000.00 2017 1

NumFOCUS Sponsored Projects

pandas logo
Jupyter
Matplotlib
Julia logo
Astropy logo
Econ-ARK logo
SymPy
Cantera logo
xarray
Blosc
Dask logo
mlpack logo
Zarr Logo
ArviZ

 

 

pandas logo
Jupyter
Matplotlib
Julia logo
Econ-ARK logo
Astropy logo
SymPy
Cantera logo
xarray
Blosc
Dask logo
mlpack logo
Zarr Logo

 

 

 

pandas logo
Jupyter
Matplotlib
Julia logo
Astropy logo
Econ-ARK logo
SymPy
Cantera logo
xarray
Blosc
Dask logo
mlpack logo
Zarr Logo