We are delighted to announce that the Horizon 2020 research proposal OpenDreamKit was accepted by the European commission.
Starting next Fall and for four years, this project will provide substantial funding to the open source computational mathematics ecosystem, and in particular popular tools such as LinBox, MPIR, SageMath, GAP, PARI/GP, LMFDB, Singular, and the IPython/Jupyter interactive computing environment.
The total budget is about 7.6 million euros. The largest portion of that will be devoted to employing an average of 11 researchers and developers working full time on the project. We will announce job openings in the coming weeks.
Additionally, the participants will contribute the equivalent of six other people working full time. Altogether the project involves about 50 people spread over 15 sites in Europe.
This is a formidable recognition of the strength and maturity of this ecosystem, of the power of open source development models, and of the amazing hard work of many communities over the last decades.
The writing of the proposal itself was open and collaborative. It grew out of a reflection on the long term needs of the community. It benefited considerably from the feedback of many; we would like to thank all those who helped shape this proposal and make it happen.
It is our hope that this financial support will help push forward critical technical tasks. We tried hard in the proposal to make a worthwhile selection of such tasks, within some constraints imposed by the specific call. We are now legally committed to treat those tasks in priority. This kind of long term prediction work is tough: one of them has actually already been completed by the community in the mean time! This is great; whenever this will happen we will be able reprioritize the resources to whatever emerging needs that will arise.
Ultimately, this project belongs to the community. Get involved!