data.table is a NumFOCUS project!

We are SO excited to announce some massive news for the data.table community: data.table is now a NumFOCUS Sponsored Project!!!

For those who aren’t familiar, NumFOCUS is an incredible nonprofit organization that supports open source projects. There are some truly iconic projects on their roster: pandas, scikit-learn, the Julia language, and so many more.

data.table is the first R-only package to become a sponsored project!!! (Although other amazing existing multilingual projects do include R, such as igraph and jupyter.)

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What does this mean for the community?

In short, this means stability and longevity.

NumFOCUS provides us with:

• A formal organizational structure after the end of the NSF Grant this August.

• A mechanism to collect donations directly to the project and for the governance team to disburse these funds when needed.

• A team of experts to help with all the bureaucratic headaches of a project – fundraising, taxes, grant writing and administration, event planning, etc.

• A network of open-source projects that will continue to grow and support each other.

The most common question we have gotten over the 2 years of NSF POSE Grant work is: what happens when the grant funding runs out? Well, more on that to come as we roll into the final months of the grant – but in brief, joining NumFOCUS covers all our structural needs going forward.

We are so grateful to the incredible NumFOCUS team for their guidance and expertise, and for believing in this project.

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How can you get involved?

Did you know that anyone can make use of the NumFOCUS support system, not just data.table maintainers?

As a community member, you can submit a ticket to request support!

Some uses for this might be:

• You’ve found a great funding opportunity, and you’d like help preparing, submitting, and administering it.

• You’d like to organize a data.table related event, and you would like help planning and possibly funding it.

• You have some tech needs (e.g. Zoom, AWS) that would support a data.table venture if we provided them.

• You want to represent data.table as part of a broader NumFOCUS venture, such as the Open Source Science Initiative or a PyData Event.

To be clear – NumFOCUS provides administrative and structural support, not decision making. Decisions about how data.table funds are spent (and, of course, about the code) are still made according to the project governance document on GitHub. For full disclosure, all submitted tickets are also viewable by the Community Organizer (currently Kelly Bodwin) and the CRAN Maintainer (currently Tyson Barrett).

Whatever your idea is, we strongly encourage you to first discuss with the Community and Maintainers by creating an issue on GitHub.

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Code of Conduct Reporting

Although we hope and anticipate this will never be needed, NumFOCUS also provides a better procedure for reporting any Code of Conduct violations in our project: https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct

Reports are first viewed by a trained team at NumFOCUS, who then make recommendations to the data.table governance team about steps forward. In this way, reports can be more anonymized, and can be assessed by unbiased third parties before coming to the governance team.