Fund participation at ADASS 2024

[kelle]

The 34th annual Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems (ADASS) conference will be held November 10-14, 2024 at the University of Malta Valletta Campus, hosted by the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy.

To further support the goal of increasing Astropy Project visibility at this meeting, we would like to make funding available to offset the travel costs of Project members’ attendance. If you are not fully funded by other sources to attend the meeting, please comment on this issue with a funding request and state the activities you plan to undertake that are beneficial to the Project. The funding request should include items and estimated costs. (For example, “approximately $1000 to cover two nights hotel and half of the airfare.”)

After the meeting, please comment on the issue again with any results or take-aways that are useful for the Project as a whole. For example, “I spoke to folks from the AMAZING collaboration about functionality they need and possible new contributions. I got some feedback about the docs of the foobar package and opened issue ## describing the challenge in more detail.”

[kelle]

I'd like to request Astropy support to attend ADASS and one day of IVOA conference.

Budget

Item	Approximate Amount
Transport to/from JFK	$200
Transport to/from hotel	$100
Flight to Malta	$1300
Hotel	€130.00 per night (6)= €780 = $875
Registration	€350 = $400
Meals (breakfast included at hotel)	~€30 per meal x 12 = €360 = $400

Total = $3275

[tepickering]

I would like to request Astropy support to attend ADASS.

Item	Approximate Amount	Notes
Transport to/from TUS + Parking	$100	mileage plus long-term parking at $5/day
Transport to/from hotel	$100
R/T flight TUS-MLA	$1200	PHX-MLA possible fallback
Hotel	€130.00 per night (6)= €780 = $875	need to arrive on 9 Nov to catch whole meeting
Registration	€350 = $400
Meals (breakfast included at hotel)	~€30 per meal x 12 = €360 = $400

Total = $3075

[kbwestfall]

I would like to request Astropy support to attend ADASS. I'll be running a Birds of a Feather session on general spectroscopy tools, as part of our spectroscopy development group.

Item	Approximate Amount	Notes
Transport to/from SFO	8 days parking at $6/day = $48
SFO - MLA flight	$1133.50
Transport to/from hotel	$100
Hotel	6 nights at € 180/night * 1.11 ($/€) = $1200	This is an upper limit. Hoping to book the cheaper hotel (€110/night).
Registration	$430 = $477	Includes conference dinner. $389 if this is excluded.
Meals	~€30 per meal x 12 meals = €360 = $400

Total ~ $3400

[eteq]

Alright folks, the finance committee (sans @kelle of course) approves all of these - go ahead and make your arrangements @kbwestfall , @tepickering, and @kelle !

[kelle]

Note for bookkeeping: We also have the approved funding request for Spectroscopy Busy Week (#421) that should be closed out with this travel.

[kelle]

Also, here's the NumFocus Travel Expense Policy:
https://support.numfocus.org/kb/article/93-travel-expense-policy/

[kelle]

Pasting travel policy below since that article is behind login:

Travel Expense Policy

Introduction
In the course of your association with NumFOCUS or its sponsored or affiliated projects, you may be required to pay for travel expenses and be reimbursed. The following is a list of approved expenses and requirements that must be met in order for your expense to be considered eligible and for you to be reimbursed for expenses incurred.

What We Cover:
Transportation costs including airfare, train fare, rental cars, taxis, rideshares, tolls, parking, baggage fees, and travel insurance. Transportation costs can include reserved seat fees and baggage fees.

Mileage will be reimbursed at the current published IRS mileage rate.
Auto rentals if extensive local travel is required and daily use is necessary.
Lodging including hotel accommodations and other short-term rentals.
Meals during the course of your travel.
Wifi during your flight if usage is for NumFOCUS/project work only.
Expense Limitations:
Airfare should be the lowest price for a non-stop coach flight to meet your needs. Please book your flights at least 14 days in advance.
Upgrade fees such as first-class seats and other boarding upgrades are not permissible.
For airport parking, please choose the most economical.
Lodging should be secured in a reasonably priced room or similar lodging in reasonable proximity to the business or project need.
We do not pay per diem fees. We will reimburse actual documented meal costs up to $90.00 per day and tip costs up to 20%.
NumFOCUS does not reimburse for non-employee/non-project representative (such as family) travel costs if that person is accompanying an employee/representative.
We do not pay bar tabs (e.g. alcohol when no meal is being purchased).
Activities that are not business-related, such as movies and shows.
Personal expenses, such as laundry, movies, mini-bar charges, car repairs, satellite radio, fines or tickets for traffic violations, insurance add-ons, pet sitting, or childcare.
Connecting transportation for non-business-related activities.
Documentation
All expenses related to travel must be documented (an invoice, receipt or similar). Documentation must include:

Vendor name
Full cost, including tip
Itemized list of expenditures
Credit card and bank statements are not acceptable documentation per the IRS.

We do not pay per diem fees, all expenditures must be accompanied by a receipt.

Questions
If a travel expense was not mentioned in the above details and you have a question about it, please contact [email protected] or submit a ticket.

Method of purchase
Some travel expenses will be paid directly through a NumFOCUS credit card, and some will be reimbursed. Any eligible expenses that are incurred on behalf of NumFOCUS or its projects will be reimbursed in full.

How to Get Reimbursed
All reimbursements must be TIMELY or may not be approved. Please submit all requests within 60 days of your travel dates.
Employee reimbursements and documentation should be submitted through the Staff Reimbursement Form
Project reimbursements should generally be submitted through the normal method that the project has for requesting expenses paid, either Open Collective or Typeform.
Project Summit reimbursements will be submitted and paid through Open Collective - the link will be made available after the Summit is announced each year.

[kbwestfall]

Post meeting comments:

The BoF on spectroscopic data reduction tools was valuable, and hopefully will lead to more people attending the monthly spectroscopy development meetings and more contributors to specreduce. Some key takeaways (from my biased perspective):

• There's a key terminology issue around what is meant by calibration, reduction, and analysis. It would be useful to add these terms to the specreduce terminology doc. Having a definition as a reference point for discussion would be useful, even if the definition has minor inaccuracies in some contexts/use cases.
• There is an effort similar to specreduce (which I had thought of as primarily related to OIR observations) for single dish radio observations, called DYSH. It may be useful to think of specreduce more broadly where we have various subpackages (e.g., specreduce.oir, specreduce.radio, specreduce.xray). But this is up to the community of contributors.
• There is a (long-standing?) tension between providing general tools vs. needing bespoke pipelines for each instrument. I think the consensus seems to be that people do not want to keep reinventing the wheel, but there's still debate and skepticism about how to address this.

[kelle]

Post meeting comments

• Astropy continues to be a highly respected, valued, and used project. It was mentioned many, many times in many various contexts.
• As usual, I had many, many useful conversations with folks about the state of Astropy. It was especially great to spread the word about our NASA Funding and encouraging folks to consider submitting a Funding Request.
• The spectroscopy session was a highlight, as discussed by @kbwestfall . The spectroscopy community is diverse but we did recruit at least one person who's very interested in getting involved in the specreduce effort!
• I was very interested in the work presented by Brigitta about developing standard tools/workflows to publish notebooks. I've posted about this in the #learn channel.
• I continued conversations with the IVOA Data Model community about making tools which make it easier to implement these data models. E.g., validators and writers in specutils for SpectrumDM 1.2

Take away, same as last year: More astropy folks should attend this conference and wear Astropy branded wear. Most of the attendees interact with our project in one way or another and having folks to chat with in person is by far the best way to build community, improve the code, and recruit more contributors/maintainers. Having a poster is good, but having PEOPLE would be ideal. Next year in Görlitz, Germany! It's gonna be an adventure!

[tepickering]

post meeting comments:

• as mentioned above, the BOF was well-attended and some potential collaborators may come out of it. some of the discussion got buried in semantics so we will want to be clearer about the goals and applicable domains for things like specreduce.
• i learned about pykoala, https://github.com/pykoala/pykoala, which has some significant overlap with specreduce. the presenter of the talk on pykoala attended the spectroscopy BOF and is one of the potential collaborators.
• brigitta's work on incorporating notebooks into testing and development and using markdown in lieu of ipynb for encoding them was super interesting. specreduce and specutils would do well to adopt those techniques.
• fortuitously, the person newly hired into the specreduce project manager role was able to attend the meetng as well. being able to have extensive in-person discussions over the course of the week was extremely valuable.
• the meeting was well-organized overall with one major exception: poster presentations. made it extremely difficult to browse posters to discover things. you had to know what poster you wanted to find and then find the right kiosk that hosted it. i have a much greater appreciation for the AAS iPoster scheme now...
• as mentioned above, it would be good to have more astropy people attend ADASS more regularly since astropy is so widely used and deeply ingrained within astronomical software. may want to consider having astropy overview talks at future meetings to help keep the community abreast of changes and plans. e.g. noone i talked to was aware of the imminent release of version 7.0.0. a few didn't even know we were up to 6.x!

[eteq]

We think all travel has been approved, but the money hasn't started flowing yet (still needs action by NF) so will wait to close this until then.

That said, this issue is a perfect example of how we want travel funding to go - lots of good comments above on outcomes and high points of the event. (hence the added label to point people to for future conferences)