KinCodeCon 2018¶

Thanks to the support of NumFOCUS via a small development grant, the Cantera Steering Committee met in person on MIT's campus in Cambridge, MA, at the 3rd Annual KinCodeCon on November 16–18, 2018.

The Steering Committee (SC) met virtually in 2016 and 2017 to discuss issues and plan for the future, and while we tried to include some live code sprinting, the virtual nature of the meetings made this challenging. It was also challenging to block off more than a few hours at a time when at our respective homes/institutions. This in-person meeting provided the opportunity to accomplish a number of our goals regarding governance of the Cantera project and improving the Cantera code.

On Friday, the SC discussed planning a roadmap for the future development of the Cantera code and community. The SC discussed promotion opportunities to increase the user-base and developer-base of Cantera, including

Scientific Computing and Python conferences such as the SciPy Conference and PyCon
Domain-specific conferences such as AIChE, AIAA, ASME, ACS, and other society conferences
Outreach to other departments/universities to encourage people to adopt Cantera in their courses and research
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participation

Specifically regarding the GSoC participation, the SC elected to participate in GSoC 2019 and will begin soliciting proposals from students before the start of 2019. Cantera will participate under the NumFOCUS umbrella to save on administrative overhead.

After lunch, the SC discussed affiliated packages in the Cantera ecosystem. These packages tend to use Cantera in some way, although they are mostly not officially maintained by the Cantera developers. We have added an Affiliated Packages page that lists the current packages the SC is aware of. The list will be "crowd-sourced" with input from the Users' Group on Google.

On Saturday, the SC discussed the governance of the Cantera project. We identified the Astropy project as an "aspirational peer" project because of their role in the astronomy community. We also identified their governance procedures as robust and relatively transparent, something we would like to strive towards.

The SC then voted to establish a list of topics that they should vote on. These topics include

Modifications of the governance procedures
Adding/removing steering committee members
Spending project funds
Adding/removing people with commit rights to GitHub repositories
Adding/removing moderators of the User’s Group
Adding/removing people to private communication channels
Adding/removing people with rights to post as Cantera on social media
Establishing sub-committees and roles
Adding/removing members from the Scientific Advisory Board

Votes will require 2/3 majority of the SC to vote "Yes" to pass. Members can be added to or removed from the SC after a nomination by an existing SC member and a 2/3 majority vote. All votes will be recorded in a Google Doc.

The current membership of the SC is

Steven DeCaluwe (2018–)
C. Franklin Goldsmith (2018–)
Kyle Niemeyer (2018–)
Raymond Speth (2018–)
Bryan Weber (2018–)
Richard West (2018–)

If you are interested in becoming a member of the SC or for more information, please contact us by email or reach out to one of the members individually.

Finally, the SC established two sub-groups within the Cantera organization. These are the people who have commit access to the Cantera organization repositories

Raymond Speth
Bryan Weber
Steven DeCaluwe

and the moderators of the Cantera Google Users' Group

Raymond Speth
Bryan Weber
Steven DeCaluwe
Nicholas Curtis

If you are interested in more information about these sub-groups or in joining them, please contact us by email or reach out to one of the members individually.

Cantera is now officially part of NumFOCUS. NumFOCUS is a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to supporting the open source scientific computing community. If you are interested in learning more about NumFOCUS, please visit their website at NumFOCUS, or our website at cantera.org/community.html#donations.