I am trying to semi-regularly share updates about what I’ve been up to in my JEC + JF work. This is a lightweight attempt at doing so! It’s part of this experiment about comms from the JEC. I’ll probably talk about work that is being led by other people, so I apologize if I discuss either too much or too little, I’ll do my best!
This is just from Chris’ perspective, so take it with a grain of salt!
Here are a few things that have stood out for me:
- First a quick shout-out to previous work we did. In mid-April the Foundation defined its funding priorities for the year, along with a lot of other strategic and direction-setting documents. I think it’s worth celebrating those because getting folks on the same page is always harder and more important than you think!
- Creating the basic processes and structures for how to operate as a board team. For example, we recently elected a board chair, added a Treasurer role that we’re trying to fill, and created a funding proposal template to help us structure proposals effectively. We’re starting to update our team compass accordingly.
- Focus on funding proposals that are time-sensitive. We’ve started off by focusing on funding proposals that are tied to events. This means JupyterCon as well as events like Community Workshops. We’ve got the JupyterCon funding approved, which has unlocked the LF events team to start organizing that work (at https://jupytercon.org). We’d like to fund a smaller series of events that are focused more on the Jupyter developer/contributor community rather than JupyterCon and are working on the feasibility of that now. (while I’m not working directly on this, I get the impression it is a ton of work, so many thanks to Rick, Brad, Jason, Ana, and the LF events team for doing a lot of organizing behind the scenes here).
- Find ways to engage Jupyter subprojects and Foundation members. We’ve been experimenting with ways to provide more transparency as well as opportunities for participation and feedback to both the Jupyter contributor community and the broader Foundation member network. This Discourse channel is one-such experiment! We’ve also run the first meeting with Foundation members to learn about their hopes and needs for the Foundation.
- Lay groundwork for future funding proposals around our goals. In the background I think there are a few other proposals in the works. For example, I’ve been looking into a collaboration with a documentation group. I’d also like to fund an effort to do some cross-community aligning and vision setting, but we’ll see where that goes. I’d like to fund more cross-project communication and information sharing in general because I think breaking out of subproject silos would have a huge benefit. I hope to be able to share more about these in the coming weeks!
My impression is that it’s pretty normal for foundations to take a while getting money out the door in the first year of their operations. They’re effectively creating a new organization from scratch, and this always takes far more time than everybody wants it to. This is even more challenging when the organization is made up of a distributed team of volunteers with very demanding day jobs (I think we all know about the challenges of that in open-source land 
). Personally, I am grateful for the time that others on the foundation board are spending trying to get things set up, and confident that we will get there.
OK that’s it from me for now, I will not spend too much time editing the above, so apologies if it is not perfect. I’m optimizing for “making it sustainable for me to do semi-regularly” over “get it just right”. That said, please give me feedback if you think this could be more useful.
As an aside, I’ve been learning from other foundations to see how they choose to use their funds. I wrote up a little blog post on why foundations seem to fund systems for development rather than development directly as a reflection. I’ll keep this in mind as I think through funding pitches that makes sense to me for the Foundation.