Authors:
- Santiago Soler (@santisoler)
- Leonardo Uieda (@leouieda)
- Lindsey Heagy (@lheagy)
- Craig Miller (@craigmillernz)
Type: Workshop
The proposal is intended to ask Software Underground to provide financial support to participants of the upcoming BIRS Workshop "Open-source tools to enable geophysical data processing and inversion". During this event, the communities of Fatiando a Terra and SimPEG will gather to work and plan the future development of open-source tools in geophysics.
The financial support would be mainly aimed to cover travel and meal expenses of participants that cannot count on any additional funding sources, or won't be able to attend without it.
The authors of this proposal are organizing a two days workshop at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS), happening from July 28 to July 30, 2023, in Banff, Canada. During this workshop, the communities of users and developers of Fatiando a Terra and SimPEG will gather to work on developing a fully open-source geophysical workflow that covers processing raw data to producing interpretable models; improving the interoperability and usability of their tools; and nurturing community building, increasing diversity and sustainability whiten these projects.
BIRS' organization will provide the venue where the event will take place, and cover in-person participants' accommodation for two nights, inside BIRS campus. Nevertheless, participants will have to gather their own funds to cover travelling and food costs.
In the spirit of increasing the diversity within these two communities, we would like to provide financial support to participants that might encounter difficulties ensuring the fundings to cover the costs of attending the workshop.
The goals of this workshop are very aligned with the ones of Software Underground. We consider this will be a very valuable event for the Fatiando and SimPEG projects, for Software Underground, and for the broader geoscientific community.
In this proposal we would like to ask Software Underground for financial support to:
- totally or partially cover travel expenses for two participants;
- totally or partially cover meal expenses for three participants, and
- purchase swag for the Workshop (optionally).
Participant's travel costs include any expense that participants might have to afford in order to travel from their current residency to BIRS facilities through an direct route: flight tickets, ferry tickets and ground transportation expenses (transit, gas usage). Meal expenses will include all meals that the participant will have to afford during the days of the workshop and travel days.
In addition, some portion of these funds will be assigned to purchasing to swag expenses, such as stickers, T-shirts and/or customized notebooks. These will include logos and content related to Software Underground, Fatiando a Terra, SimPEG, BIRS, the Workshop, and other geosciences-related communities and projects. Swag items will be purchased only after participant's travel and meal expenses have been covered, with any remaining funds.
As organizers, we identified a few participants that qualify as beneficiaries for receiving this financial support. This selection was carried out considering that these participants:
- have confirmed their in-person attendance to the workshop;
- lack of third-party funding sources to partially or totally cover these expenses; and
- expressed the need for financial support from event organizers.
The list of beneficiaries contains three participants that would require some level of financial support. Through this proposal we would like to ask Software Underground the funds to cover the meal expenses for the three beneficiaries, the travel costs for two of them, and some additional funds to cover swag expenses.
Considering that most of the meal expenses will take place during the event, we'll use the prices of meals offered by BIRS as a guide to estimate costs per beneficiary.
| Meal | Cost (CAD) |
|---|---|
| Breakfast | 18.43 |
| Lunch | 22.15 |
| Dinner | 29.42 |
| Total per day | 70.00 |
This adds up to 70 CAD of meal expenses per day per beneficiary. In order to cover the meal expenses for three participants during the two days of workshop, they would sum up a total of 420 CAD.
We would cover the travel costs for two participants that need to travel from within North America to Banff. Considering flight tickets and ground transportations, the travel costs would be of approximately 660 CAD for each participant. Travel costs would sum up 1320 CAD.
We would add 260 CAD for purchasing swag for the Workshop.
| Cost (CAD) | |
|---|---|
| Meal expenses | 420.00 |
| Travel costs | 1320.00 |
| Swag | 260.00 |
| Total | 2000.00 |
Through this proposal we would like to ask Software Underground to provide up to 2000.00 CAD to cover meal, travel and (optionally) swag expenses for the BIRS Workshop.
Software Underground will provide the fundings for covering beneficiaries' costs in advance, and/or through reimbursement. Beneficiaries will be required to provide tickets, bills and proof of payment for the expenses covered by this financial aid. These expenses will be reviewed by the event organizers and by Software Underground Board, and ultimately approved for reimbursement.
Beneficiaries can choose to remain anonymous to the general public and Software Underground community. They can opt-out of being mentioned as beneficiaries in any public release of the event, social media publication and blog post. Beneficiaries' personal information will be required to be disclosed only to the event organizers and Software Underground Board Members.
After the event, the Workshop will output some written products in a form of blog posts, tutorials, or similar. Their content will be related to topics of interest for Software Underground, such as participant's experience during the workshop, content for future Transform tutorials, plans for nurturing our communities, etc. These blog posts will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, allowing Software Underground to publish them on its website and social media.
Some of the selected participants and the organizers have applied to
third-party financial support provided by BIRS Partners.
By June 2 we haven't received any confirmation or denial from any of them.
The contacted BIRS partners have rejected the funding applications, mostly due
to the type of Workshop we'll be running, which is not aligned to their
particular goals.
In the hypothetical case that the organizers or any beneficiary gather the funds to partially or totally cover their travel and meal expenses, the financial aid provided by Software Underground would be used to cover any remaining expenses of the other participants, spent on swag, or ultimately returned to Software Underground.
This content is in the public domain.