*** Why does your project want to join Conservancy? Specifically, what benefits do you expect to take advantage of immediately and within a few years? The project wants to join the Conservancy for legal and financial backing. Specifically, the lack of clearly established financial references has made sponsoring of the project difficult. In the long run, being a member of the Conservancy also guarantees more independence from funding sources, so that those will not try to establish themselves as a "governing" organisation. *** Please give a detailed description of the project. Scikit-learn is a Python module integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for medium-scale problems (very simply put, machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with the creation of programs that can "learn" from data). This package focuses on bringing machine learning to non-specialists using a general-purpose, high-level programming language. *** What FLOSS License(s) does your project use? Please include the primary license, and list other licenses for code that is included. (e.g., "The project as a whole is GPLv3-or-later, but about a dozen files in the directory src/external/ are under the Apache-2.0 license") The project is distributed under the terms of the Revised (3-clause) BSD license. In addition, external data sources from statlib and the UCI machine learning repository were integrated in sklearn/datasets/data. These files are in the public domain. *** Please give us your roadmap and plans for future development of the project, including both code and community plans. Code will continue to grow as we focus on better core machine learning techniques: integrating more standard machine learning algorithms, and better model selection strategies. Community-wise, the project has completely out-grown its original contributors and is now driven actively by a dozen of contributors from different institution with commit rights, and that do the releases. The project will thus stick to a community-driven governance model. *** Please give us the main link to the projects primary website. http://scikit-learn.org *** Please give us a URL to a code repository we can clone and/or checkout. https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn *** Have you ever had funds held by the project, or by any individual on behalf of the project? How and for what did you spend those funds? Are there funds remaining? If so, who is holding them now? Funds were held by INRIA on behalf of the project. They were used for organizing a code sprint (travel expenses) in Granada, after a Machine Learning conference (NIPS) in Dec. 2011. *** Do you have any ongoing fundraising programs for your project? How do they operate, and how much funding is brought in through these mechanisms currently? We have no ongoing fundraising, but occasionally we consider raising funds for travel on the order of a thousand euros. *** Does your project owe funds to anyone? No. *** Has your project ever had legal trouble, been involved in legal proceedings or received a letter accusing your project of patent, copyright, trademark or other types of infringement? No. *** Please give a brief history of the project, focusing on how the community developed and the general health of the community. Be sure to include information on any forks or other disputes that have occurred in the community. This project was started in 2007 as a Google Summer of Code project by David Cournapeau. Later that year, Matthieu Brucher started work on this project as part of his PhD thesis. In 2009 Fabian Pedregosa, Gael Varoquaux, Alexandre Gramfort and Vincent Michel of INRIA took leadership of the project and made the first public release on February 1st 2010. Importantly, INRIA payed a full-time junior engineer for 2 years on the project (2009-2011). Since then, releases were made following a ~3 month cycle, and a striving international community has been leading the development. In two years, more than 70 developers have contributed to scikit-learn, each release having more than 20 contributors. INRIA has allocated another 2 years of junior engineer funding for 2012-2014. In 2011 and 2012, several Google Summer of Code projects were funded (1 in 2011, 3 in 2012). *** Please explain how your project is governed. Who makes the decisions in the project? How do you resolve disputes, particularly about non-code issues? The project is community-driven: all patches are reviewed through the GitHub Pull Request interface, and all major decisions are discussed on the mailing list. There is a wide list of contributors with commit rights. When disputes arise, there is a strong attempt to resolve them by consensus. If no consensus can be reached, the view of the most senior contender is chosen. So far, this situation has not really occurred, as consensus has always been reached via compromises or voting on the mailing list. *** If your project runs on Linux-based systems, please list all the distributions that include your project, and what "repository area" the package appears in. If you aren't packaged for any major distributions, please tell us why you believe your project hasn't been packaged yet. - Debian, main - Ubuntu, main - Mandriva, contrib - ArchLinux *** Does your project have any existing for-profit or non-profit affiliations, funding relationships, or other agreements between the project and/or key leaders of your project and other organizations? Has the project had such affiliations in the past? Please list of all of them in detail and explain their nature. Even tangential affiliations and relationships, or potential affiliations that you plan to create should be included. - INRIA is funding a full time developer on scikit-learn. - Google has funded 1 GSoC project in 2011, and is funding 3 GSoC projects in 2012. *** Approximately how many users does your project have, and what items lead you to believe your userbase is of a particular size (e.g., post counts to your user mailing list)? The user count is hard to establish. We believe that a lower bound is of a few thousands of active users. We have 513 followers on github. Popularity contests on Ubuntu shows that one out of 3000 Ubuntu installs have scikit-learn. There are between 250 and 500 emails per month on the mailing list. Scikit-learn is included in Enthought Python Distribution that has tens of thousands of users in research labs, industry and academia. *** Please list the names, email addresses, and affiliations (e.g., employer) of key developers and major contributors. Include both current and past contributors and developers. Please include date ranges of when those developers/contributors were active. Please make this list as extensive and complete as possible. You need not include every last person who sent one patch, but please include at least those who regularly sent patches or were/are regular contributors. If you project has contributors who have been inactive for more than five years, you need only to list such inactive contributors if they made substantial contributions. Alexandre Gramfort , INRIA, 2009 - Now Alexandre Passos Andreas Mueller , University of Bonn, 2010 - Now Bertrand Thirion , INRIA, 2009 - Now Brian Holt Clay Woolam Conrad Lee Dan Yamins David Cournapeau , Enthought, 2007 - 2008 David Warde-Farley , University of Montreal, 2011 - Now Edouard Duchesnay , CEA, 2009 - 2010 Fabian Pedregosa , INRIA, 2009 - Now Gael Varoquaux , INRIA, 2009 - Now Gilles Louppe , University of Liège, 2011 - Now Jake Vanderplas , University of Washington James Bergstra , MIT, 2010 - Now Jaques Grobler , INRIA, 2012 - Now Jean Kossaifi , Student, 2011 Kenneth C. Arnold , Lars Buitinck , University of Amsterdam, 2011 - Now Mathieu Blondel , Kobe University, 2010 - Now Matthieu Brucher , 2008 - 2010 Matthieu Perrot Nelle Varoquaux , Mines ParisTech, 2011 - Now Nicolas Pinto Olivier Grisel , Nuxeo, 2010 - Now Paolo Losi Peter Prettenhofer Pietro Berkes Robert Layton Ron Weiss , Google Satrajit Ghosh , MIT, 2011 - Now Shiqiao Du Thouis (Ray) Jones , Institut Curie, 2011 - Now Vincent Dubourg Vincent Michel , Logilab, 2009 - Now Virgile Fritsch , INRIA, 2010 - Now Vlad Niculae , University of Bucharest, 2011 - Now Xinfan Meng Yaroslav Halchenko *** Please include any other pertinent information not given above that you feel we should review with your application. A paper about scikit-learn was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Machine Learning Research: F. Pedregosa et al. (2011). Scikit-learn: machine learning in Python. JMLR 12:2825-2830. http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/v12/pedregosa11a.html