Hello everyone!
From the PyMC team we are continuously working on fostering and energizing the already amazing PyMC community, bringing together contributors and users from multiple fields and from all around the world. And we have great news to share!
Here are the highlights:
- PyMC now has a project wide website and a blog! www.pymc.io and www.pymc.io/blog.html
- PyMC is now on Meetup
- We are hosting regular office hours, if you are interested in contributing to PyMC and would like to speak with PyMC team members subscribe to the
office-hourstag or on Meetup
Roughly a year ago, PyMC participated in Google Season of Docs, was given a CZI grant and we started updating our governance doc to make sure it was accurate and reflexed the state of the project. All that while development for the 4.0 version (already in beta release) was ongoing.
We had Steering council elections, we hosted a sprint and multiple webinars together with Data Umbrella thanks to the initiative and leadership of @almostmeenal, we improved our internal organization with multiple teams and already have several core members of the PyMC team who do not contribute to development activities.
The currently active teams are: dev, docs and community teams. Discourse has always been what vertebrates the PyMC community and we do not plan to change this; one of the main goals of the community team is maintaining and energizing the forum. We are also aiming to extend our range of activities and their formats, mainly with the three points highlighted above.
Project wide website and blog
With v4, improvements in our docs and other initiatives like the sprint, we felt the need to create a project wide website instead of duplicating the “about pymc” section in the pymc, pymc-examples and pymc-experimental websites.
This website also has a blog section for announcements, events or testimonials that require a longer write-up but do not have a place in the documentation. This welcome blog post has more details on what to expect from the blog and how to post there if interested!
PyMC meetup
We have also started a PyMC meetup to publish and advertize events related to PyMC. These include but are not limited to office hours, PyMCon, sprints… We will continue to post announcements for the events here on Discourse, but some might require rsvp on Meetup.
Office hours
After the sprint where we hosted pre and post sprint office hours for people interested in contributing to PyMC, we have decided to keep hosting office hours thanks to the efforts and coordination of @cluhmann. Office hours will happen regularly, but at least for now there won’t be a fixed frequency or pre-defined time for them.