CASS Foundations Working Group (Foundations Forum)

The foundations forum is an open forum for projects to meet and share experiences with joining or membership in an open-source software foundation (e.g., NumFOCUS, High Performance Software Foundation, etc.)

We will generally try to structure these forums around:

• Benefits of software foundations
• Joining NumFOCUS, HPSF, or the Apache Software Foundation (and possibly others)
• Experiences with foundations (I can talk about Parsl and NumFOCUS, and others would be welcome to talk about their experiences with other foundations)
• Another foundation-related topic that the group chooses

Meetings will be open to anyone who wants to join - so please feel free to share

• Meetings will usually be recorded and posted on youtube, with links to them from a part of the CORSA website (see below).
• Meetings will be announced via the CORSA email list and the CASS #general and #wg-foundations slack channels

Next meeting: uncertain

There is not a next meeting planned at this time due to lack of attendance at the past meetings. We’ll think a bit more about how to proceed, and announce next steps in the future.

Past meetings

Jan 29, 2025

In this meeting, we had formal talks from two software foundations, HPSF, represented by Todd Gamblin, and NumFOCUS, represented by Leah Silen, followed by Q&A with Todd and Leah. The video recording of the meeting is now available at https://youtu.be/PUEEntwY75o

Dec 5, 2024

Similar to last month, we had a small group (Jason Gates, Dan Katz, JC Subida, Addi Thakur Malviya, Daniel Howard, Keita Teranishi) and good discussions, touching on benefits of foundations, requirements of joining, and community activities. We also had an informal Q&A session.

This meeting was not recorded.

Oct 30, 2024

We had a small group (JC Subida, Peter Lindstrom, Todd Gamblin, Dan Katz, Greg Watson, Elaine Raybourn) and good discussions after some introductions, touching on:

• different types of foundations, pros and cons
• how foundations can take in funding from different agencies and then allocate that to project work at different institutions
• issues about overhead, rules from different agencies, etc.
• reasons for projects to bring in money from a foundation vs to a performance institution directly.
• legal status of foundations and projects
• which kinds of projects (started by which kinds of institutions and how many of them) join foundations, and which I hope we will be able to build from this meeting.

This meeting was not recorded.