Hello,
I would like to nominate myself for an additional one-year term on the SGB.
To update my 2022 statement, my recent contributions to Stan and the Stan community are overhauling the official Stan documentation and teaching a workshop on BRMS at the St Louis StanCon. I continue to maintain CmdStan and CmdStanPy.
These were my stated objectives in 2022:
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Creating more events and resources for Stan education and outreach.
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Drawing up guidelines for fund-raising and fund-giving as well as providing more transparency around the Stan NumFOCUS funding and expenditures.
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Streamlining SGB processes in order to reduce the time commitment required of its members.
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Working with the Stan developers to make sure that the Stan software eco-system continues to improve and that the developer community is open as well as open-source.
In the past 2 years, as part of the SGB, most of these objectives were met:
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We had an online StanConnect in 2022 and an IRL StanCon in 2023, although full credit goes to the event organizers for their considerable time and efforts. Going forward, we will have another StanCon in 2024 and I am fully supportive of future online and IRL conferences, mini-cons, workshops, and hackathons.
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The SGB has very much streamlined its process while remaining responsive to requests.
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We facilitated communication among developers. The Stan developer community remains healthy; new Stan-adjacent projects have joined the ecosystem, notably BridgeStan, and a few new individuals have volunteered contributions.
Fundraising remains challenging. As a member of the SGB I will continue to apply for grants and sponsorships so that the project can afford to properly maintain the devops support and CI needed to create new Stan releases, and I will continue working with NumFOCUS and their finance team to ensure that project funds are accounted for.
It has been my pleasure to work with the 2022 and 2023 SGBs, and I hope that you will give me the chance to continue to do so in 2024.
cheers,
Mitzi