Minutes of SunPy Board Meeting 20150413

Date of Meeting

13th April 2015

Attendance

Present: Steven Christe (Chair), David Perez-Suarez (Vice-Chair), Andrew Inglis (Secretary), Albert Shih, Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros

Absent: Jack Ireland, Stuart Mumford, Thomas Robitaille, Russell Hewett

Meeting Notes

• Discussion on community contributions to SunPy. Steven suggested we may be outpacing the rest of the solar community with our code standard requirements. A consequence of this is that it may be frustrating/difficult for people new to SunPy or Python to contribute. Contributions tend to attract a high level of code comments - members of the community are not used to this, and it can be a turn off.

  • Agreement that there is no desire to lower the coding standards required to contribute to SunPy. However, the board agreed that it is very important for SunPy to be an approachable and friendly project.
  • One suggestion was to more formally introduce a mentoring system into the project. New contributors would be assigned a mentor (an experienced SunPy developer) to help them deal with peer-review code comments, and to provide a friendly face and point of contact. General support for this idea.

• Related to the problem of gaining more contributors to SunPy, Juan Carlos mentioned that a clear list of plans or requested features is not easily visible on the SunPy websites. If it is not clear what code is wanted or needed, then this is also a barrier to contributing for new people. For example, GDL has well-publicized plans on their site. Agreement that this should be made clearer on the SunPy sites.

• General agreement that we want to survey the solar community more widely to find out what people want from SunPy. As an example of this, Daniel Ryan is presenting a poster at the upcoming TESS meeting (26th - 30th April 2015), which could be a good opportunity to canvas opinion.

• The board discussed the current arrangement with Albert as Interim Lead Developer. Albert pointed out that he has less time available to put into the project than Stuart had, and that some things are currently still deferred to Stuart (e.g. releases). The board believes that the current setup is working well, and that the project continues to make progress.

• Google Summer of Code (GSOC) and ESA Summer of Code (ESOC) were discussed. SunPy will probably get 3 students in total from these programs. Also have a student, Mateo, working with David, sponsored for 1 month on a RAS grant. Also Chloe Guennou is writing a proposal to the Spanish funding agency to work on SunPy.

• It was suggested to establish a SunPy calendar. It would be open to the community to see what SunPy is going, and when SunPy representatives are going to conferences. Resolved to create this, starting with a Google calendar.

• Discussed the SunPy paper. It has been a very long time since resubmission to the Computational Science & Discovery journal (~6 months). The journal is not proving very responsive. The board discussed that it may be better to publish an updated version of the paper (for 0.6 release) on ArXiv and resubmit to another journal such as Solar Physics.

Meeting concludes.