Cycle 4 Funding: Astroquery Maintenance (Brasseur)

[ceb8]

This is my funding request for ongoing Astroquery maintenance work.

It's still in draft because not all the detailed have been fleshed out.

I'm currently requesting for a 3 year period of performance. A potential complication with this is that I may move countries in the middle of that period which would necessitate a change in how the grant is paid out (i.e. if I move away from the UK I become ineligable to work in the UK and therefore Aperio cannot manage my contract any longer). If this is a problem I can adjust the period of the grant accordingly.

[kelle]

Include a description of work for 3 years and then in the budget section, provide details for year 1 and estimates for the future years. In particular, if the plan is to start out under the Aperio umbrella, please state that.

[eteq]

Please react to this comment to vote on this proposal (👍, 👎, or no reaction for +0)

[aaryapatil]

Hi Clara,

I'm writing on behalf of Astropy's Finance Committee regarding the outcome of your recent funding request PR #378. We have opened a new issue #423 to track the progress.

We are pleased to be able to let you know that, following consultation with the community, we are able to approve this request. We can currently fund the Year 1 amount of $7,200 (US) to carry out the project. Funding beyond this amount will be contingent upon the availability of funds. (We will be using the full budgets of all of the approved requests to craft future grant and funding proposals.)

Ana Gabela and I will be your contacts on the Finance Committee to facilitate this award. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions or concerns. Please do not reach out to NumFOCUS directly.

In addition, new to this funding cycle, is the assignment of a COTR (Contracting Officer's Technical Representative) to each funded project. This concept is borrowed from government funding agencies, although it is to be stressed that Astropy's goal is to make the COTR role as low-overhead as possible. The COTR’s primary responsibility is to make sure the work is happening at the expected pace and, if necessary, to be a liaison between the funded project and the Finance Committee or CoCo. The COTR for your project will be assigned shortly and we’ll also be sending out more details about how we see this working.

The next steps are:
Independent Contractor:

Please make sure that you are registered with Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/): this is the system you will use to submit your invoices for payment. Note that your invoices should be submitted through the NASA project on Open Collective.
We will reach out through NumFOCUS, Astropy's Fiscal Sponsor, to set up an “independent contractor agreement” (ICA; effectively a contract) and formal scope of work for the project.

We expect the work to be carried out between 2024-05-01 and 2025-04-31 (the “period of performance”). This can be edited based on University of Toronto policies.

Congratulations --- we are really looking forward to seeing you put these funds to good use!

Aarya on behalf of the Astropy Finance Committee