• About

About

This is the main website of the Scientific Python project.

The scientific Python ecosystem is a loose federation of community-developed and -owned Python projects widely used in scientific research, technical computing, and data science. The scientific Python community of contributors and maintainers are employed by a variety of universities, research labs, and companies. Historically, the community has been composed primarily of volunteers working in their free time over nights and weekends. Given the growing importance of these tools, funding to work on these projects has been increasing. However, volunteers continue to drive the development of these tools. This is true, in particular, because existing funding is largely short-term and not certain to continue.

Ecosystem Projects#

There are a numerous projects that use Python for computing, but we focus specifically on projects that are:

• Science focused

  Tools used by students, researchers, and scientists for teaching and discovery that are openly shared with the public.

• Open source

  Distributed under unrestrictive open source licenses, projects are developed and maintained publicly and accessible to all.

• Community-driven

  Projects are developed by open communities composed primarily of the users of the software.

Who we are#

Learn more about the community that powers Scientific Python.

What We Do#

We release all our work openly. In particular, all our code is released under a 3-Clause BSD or MIT license and documentation is released under the CC-BY license.

• SPECs Scientific Python Ecosystem Coordination documents are a mechanism by which practices are discussed and propagated throughout the ecosystem.
• Summits At the summits, we get together both virtually and in-person to plan and do ecosystem work.
• Development Guide Read this community-maintained guide to learn best practices for library development.
• Lecture Notes Learn or teach how to use the scientific Python ecosystem with classroom-style lecture notes.
• Sparse Arrays One of our current focuses is on improving and maintaining the sparse array capabilities and interoperability in the ecosystem.
• Community Our community efforts focus on broadening participation and better coordinating volunteer efforts.

Read about the grants that fund the work we do.

Leadership#

The following people are involved with leading the overall project. For more information, see our governance and decision making process.

Community Managers#

Community Leaders#

Emeritus Community Leaders#

Other Teams#

As a coordinating effort, the Scientific Python project has several teams that operate across the ecosystem. Specific projects may have their own governance structures. For example, the SPEC Steering Committee governance model is described here.