Hello,
I would like to nominate myself for a two-year term in the Stan Governing Body.
I’ve been a Stan contributor since 2014. My main contributions have been as a Stan developer, most recently, developing CmdStanPy. In 2017 I jumped into the deep end of the Bayesian Modeling pond by working with folks at NYU to implement a popular disease mapping model the BYM2 model in Stan, with lots of help from Dan Simpson and Andrew Gelman. Since then I’ve continued to write about and give talks on this model and Stan modeling in general at conferences and meetups, including StanCon (of course), PyData, and WiMLDS meetups. It’s very satisfying to work on the Stan project and interact with so many different kinds of people working on so many different kinds of applications.
The Stan project continues to mature. I think that the two previous elected SGB’s have put in place a good set of policies and procedures, notably the developer voting procedure and the code of conduct and adjudication committee. Most importantly, they managed to keep StanCon going throughout the ongoing COVID pandemic, starting with the online global StanCon in 2020 and the StanCon Connect sessions in 2021.
As a member of the SGB, I would advocate:
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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.
Now that the previous boards have established a working framework for governance, the focus of the SGB should shift towards education and outreach. We should continue to sponsor StanCon connect sessions and other kinds of conferences, tutorials, and workshops. We should encourage Stan users to self-organize along many dimensions and to create more specialized field guides like the current “Stan for X” repositories https://cognitive-science-stan.github.io, https://education-stan.github.io., https://stanecology.github.io, and https://epidemiology-stan.github.io.
A secondary focus is overall project sustainability. We need to make the serving on the SGB be a far more lightweight time commitment than it is currently, so that more and different people will be able to participate.
A large part of the reason for being a part of NumFOCUS is to help on the funding front. In the past year I’ve helped raise $650K for Andrew Gelman at Columbia. I would be happy to work with the SGB, NumFOCUS, and the community at large to raise funds through the Stan NumFOCUS non-profit in order to realize that above goals.
These are my qualifications and agenda. Questions welcome!
cheers,
Mitzi