PyHC project status, November 2020


We held the fifth, and second fully-virtual, PyHC meeting over a four-week long period, starting Monday October 26th, and ending Monday, November 16th. During this time frame we held three plenary sessions, which covered a couple project updates, as well as a more in-depth discussion about PyHC’s structure and funding. We also hosted hackathon, tutorial, and unconference sessions (one each Thursday of the four-week meeting period). Although this spread-out format allowed more time for discussion, as a group we agreed that a more condensed format would be desirable for the spring 2021 virtual meeting. As an example, we’d like a meeting schedule more akin to IHDEA’s 2020 meeting. The spring 2021 meeting will occur sometime mid-to-late April. Exact dates will be decided via a poll sent to the PyHC community after the holidays. Presentations and notes from the fall 2020 meeting are available on Google Drive via https://heliopython.org/meetings/. Lastly for meetings, we will host a PyHC poster session at the virtual AGU 2020 meeting on December 8th. Poster authors have been given the option to choose an hour or two time frame that they’ll be available for comments, questions, etc.

We continued to hold biweekly telecons up until the fall 2020 meeting. These included discussions around an official PyHC logo (a final version was accepted mid October), fall 2020 meeting planning, and presentations and discussions about reproducible software environments and the Humboldt project. We will pick up the telecon schedule again after the holidays. Several updates were made to the PyHC website during the quarter. A new web page was created for the PyHC fall 2020 meeting. The People page was updated to include current PyHC members, the Project page was updated to fix broken package logo URLs, include package column sorting, and include SpacePy in the core packages, and the Blog page was updated to incorporate pagination. Finally, the PyHC website is now served over https, several packages submitted self-evaluations (which were reviewed and approved), and the PyHC logo was put to use on the website.