I’d be honoured to serve on the SunPy Steering Committee. I have been contributing for SunPy for many years now, undertaking many of the odd jobs around the project. I have, for example, led the handling the pull requests across almost all SunPy repositories, led the release of new packages, and played a leading role in running our GSOC projects.
As a member of the Steering Committee, I would focus on several key areas:
The first would be to expand the number of project custodians and in turn the number of people who maintain each project under the SunPy umbrella. If this does not happen, we run the real risk of becoming a zombie project. We are all working on a best-efforts basis currently and that has some obvious downsides: People may not be able to respond to pull requests in a timely manner; They may drop in and out whilst major changes are being made leaving other members feeling that they are being overly criticised and under helped. With a constant slow attrition of members to outside responsibilities we must continue to expand to avoid these issues becoming worse.
Secondly, I would wholeheartedly support the efforts of the SunPy community to secure vital funding. This is essential to the health of the project. We must aggressively push for this wherever we can.
Thirdly, I would help to increase our outreach within the research community. Although I am not currently an active researcher, I recognise the importance of this initiative and would rely on the support of my esteemed colleagues in the SunPy community to advance this effort. I will provide support wherever possible. Engaging researchers as users early on enhances our chances of securing their contributions in the future.
Finally, I would drive further integration with the upstream. We need to work with xarray to try to get support with WCS and Astropy objects. We need to continue our work with PyOpenSci to revamp the affiliated package system. We need to liaise with PyHC whether further integration is possible and, if not, identify routes forward to expand into Heliophysics. We need to work harder to integrate more with the Scientific Python ecosystem and this is something I believe I can drive forward.
I don’t claim that these tasks are easy. They have been recognised as challenges for some time and will require considerable time and effort to resolve. However, by working together over the next few years, we can ensure the long-term stability of the SunPy project.