Cycle 4 funding: Derek Homeier Core Maintainer, Coordination Committee and Affiliated Editor Support

[jdswinbank]

Issue to track progress of Cycle 4 funding request which was approved in #397 .

• Project Description
• Awarded Amount: $21,600 (US)
• Period of Performance: 2024-05-01 through 2025-04-30
• Finance Committee Contact: @jdswinbank
• COTR: @aaryapatil

[AnaGabela]

Hi Derek,

Let's get you started on getting a new contract with NumFocus because I think that's gonna take them a little while. Here are the instructions:

Go to https://numfocus.org/rocket
Click on Independent Contractor Registration
Form fields
Project: Astropy
Grant: NASA
Full Name
Email address
Street Address
Street Address
City
State
Postal Code
Country
Start Date: May 1, 2024-April 30, 2025
Description: Core Maintainer, Coordination Committee and Affiliated Editor Support
Project Contact name: Astropy Finance Committee
Project Contact email: [email protected]
Payment method: ACH, Wire Transfer, PayPal
Bank Information
Comments about payment
Upload W9 or W8
Please let me know that you have submitted the form so we can keep track of it.

[dhomeier]

Hi @AnaGabela, will do probably next week. I have started doing some work this month, but would prefer to invoice just semi-annually (i.e. at the end of this year and next year) if that's OK – so should leave plenty of time to set up the contract.

Description: Specreduce and spectroscopy development

I believe this was incorrectly copied over from another template (same, it seems, for other FRs) – my project is primarily core maintainer and CoCo work with a bit of specutils development, but hardly specreduce.

Another question: original period of performance was until 2025-04-30, but the contract states - Feb 28 – is this just the latest start date, or simply renewal time with NumFOCUS, or should I plan this part of the work to be completed by February? Thanks, Derek

[AnaGabela]

ooops you are right.. my mistake!

You are right

[AnaGabela]

Hi,
I am just checking to see if you had submitted the form so we can keep track of it. If you have sent it of let me know so I check on the contract. If you still need to do it please let me know when you are done!
Let me know if you have any questions.

[AnaGabela]

Form summbited July 12, 2024

[AnaGabela]

Hi @dhomeier, NumFocus has sent you the contract... can you check and see if you have received it? The last email I got from them said the contractor name (yours) was fixed.. please let me know if you found it and sent it back to them.
Thanks!

[dhomeier]

@aaryapatil for the first part of the project up to the end of 2024, work as invoiced is for
14 CoCo, 6 DevCon and Spectroscopy meetings; Coordination Meeting SOC.
PRs

• Fix treatment of 'BLANK' and ignore_blank for uncompressed integer images astropy#16636
• Enable fit_mean=True in lombscargle_scipy for Scipy 1.15+ astropy#17170
• Restore 'inplace' to LMLSQFitter __call__ signature astropy#17172
• Update docs to reflect default Table.meta is now dict astropy#17336
• Allow any Voting Member to initiate nomination process for adding new role members #436
• Fixing documentation and message template for adding new members #447
• Add Clement Robert as general maintainer for Astropy core astropy.github.com#626
• Update changelog for #1113 and loader documentation specutils#1152
• Add documentation for kwargs passed to reader+writer backends specutils#1157
• Use exact domain limits for polynomial wavelength solutions in _read_non_linear_iraf_wcs specutils#1199

Reviews in astropy, astropy-data, astropy-project, astropy-APEs, astropy.github.com, specutils.

Ongoing support work in Slack, OpenAstronomy, Facebook groups.

[dhomeier]

I would like to request an extension over the originally applied for second year @ $32,400 (or less subject to availability), and possibly a third year. I'd note however that in the last round of evaluations there was general support for tying funding requests more directly to specific work packages; in this case this would include my work on the CoCo. My present term on CoCo ends at the end of this year.
I also have used 150 out of the 180 hours approved for this period; if possible I would request an additional 30 hours @ $120/hr to continue at the original pace for the remaining 4 months.