Project & Team
Introduction
This page describes the Gammapy project organisation and the main roles and responsibilities in the Gammapy team.
This structure was put in place in January 2018 based on our experience developing Gammapy since 2013, as well more generally with science tool software development in the H.E.S.S. and CTAO collaborations. We also took inspiration from the way the Astropy and Sunpy projects are organised, since they are in a similar situation as Gammapy: a distributed development team and a variety of people and projects using and depending on them.
We expect this structure to evolve over the coming years, adapting to the size and composition of the Gammapy development team, and the requirements and needs of scientists and projects using Gammapy. If you would like to become part of the Gammapy team, please get in contact. Help is always welcome!
Overview
The following sections describe the major roles and responsibilities in the Gammapy team:
- Coordination committee
- Project managers
- Lead developers
- Sub-package maintainers
- Contributors
- Institutional support
- Grants
Coordination Committee
The Gammapy coordination committee (CC) is the board that is responsible to promote, coordinate and steer Gammapy developments. It also serves as main contact point for the Gammapy project.
Gammapy is developed and used by people and projects from several institutes and countries, with different needs, priorities and schedules. Members of the CC are representatives for the major stakeholders, i.e. groups that have contributed significantly to Gammapy development, as well as projects like H.E.S.S. and CTAO that are using Gammapy. In addition, the Gammapy project managers and lead developers are part of the Gammapy CC.
Responsibilities include:
- Ensure that scientists and projects that are using Gammapy have reliable, good and long-term support
- Promote the use of Gammapy by new projects, especially as science tool for CTAO
- Support and grow the Gammapy team (help find manpower and funding)
-
Make decisions on the scope, content and development priorities for the Gammapy package.
In many cases this will be done via Proposal for improvement of Gammapy (PIG) documents. - Support and coordinate the use of Gammapy for scientific or technical studies and papers
- The CC is the official contact point for the Gammapy project.
- Appoint the Gammapy project managers (non-technical lead) and lead developers (technical lead)
-
CC members should join the Gammapy CC mailing list and calls for important discussions
(day-to-day management is left to the project managers and lead developers).
Current CC members (alphabetical order):
- Axel Donath (CfA/Harvard, U.S.A.)
- Bruno Khélifi (APC, France)
- Catherine Boisson (LUTh, France)
- Christopher van Eldik (Erlangen University, Germany)
- David Berge, as deputy Emma de Ona Wilhelmi (DESY, Germany)
- Fabio Acero (CEA/Irfu/DAp-AIM, France)
- Fabio Pintore (IASF Palermo/INAF, Italy), as deputy Martina Cardillo (Roma, INAF)
- Jim Hinton (MPIK, Germany)
- Jose Luis Contreras (UCM, Spain)
- Matthias Fuessling (S.U.S.S. coordinator of CTAO)
- Régis Terrier (APC, France)
- Roberta Zanin (Project Scientist of CTAO)
- Rubén López-Coto (IAA/CSIC, Spain)
- Stefan Funk (Erlangen University, Germany)
Project managers
The project manager and the deputy project manager are the non-technical executive lead for the Gammapy project.
The project managers are appointed by the Gammapy coordination committee, and work closely with the Gammapy coordination committee, lead developers, contributors and users.
Responsibilities include:
- Organise and drive all non-technical aspects of the project on a day-to-day basis. Keep the overview of ongoing activities, schedules and action items and follow up to make sure all important things get done.
- Serve as Gammapy coordination committee secretary (schedule and moderate calls; give status reports; write minutes)
- Organise Gammapy user calls and training events via gammapy-meetings
- Keep an overview and help coordinate all activities that have some involvement of Gammapy, such as e.g. papers, presentations or posters about or using Gammapy at gamma-ray astronomy meetings or conferences, or tutorials at schools / workshops on gamma-ray astronomy data analysis.
- Maintain Gammapy communication channels (mailing lists, slack, github, ...) as well as the content at https://gammapy.org/
The current project manager is Bruno Khélifi, the deputy project manager is Christopher van Eldik.
Lead developers
The lead developers are the technical executive leads for the Gammapy project.
The lead developers are appointed by the Gammapy coordination committee, and work closely with the Gammapy coordination committee, project managers and contributors.
Responsibilities include:
- Organise and drive all technical aspects of the project on a day-to-day basis. Keep the overview of ongoing activities, schedules and action items and follow up to make sure all important things get done.
- Serve on the Gammapy coordination committee, as the link between CC and the development team.
- Ensure that Proposal for improvement of Gammapy (PIG) documents are properly reviewed and eventually decisions made by the CC.
- Manage the Gammapy developer / maintainer / contributor team. Distribute tasks and assign responsibilities to other Gammapy core developers.
- Ensure that anyone interested in contributing to Gammapy development has good resources (documentation, communication, mentoring) to get started. Specifically: maintain the Gammapy developer documentation that describes all aspects of Gammapy development (code, testing, documentation, processes).
- Ensure Gammapy infrastructure is well set up and maintained (issue tracker and pull requests on Github, continuous integration tests, documentation builds, releases and distribution).
- Organise Gammapy developer calls and coding sprints via gammapy-meetings
- Schedule Gammapy releases and define which fixes and features go in which release, taking the needs of people and projects using Gammapy as well as available manpower for developments into account. Either execute releases directly or assign a release manager.
The current lead developers are Axel Donath and Régis Terrier.
Sub-package maintainers
Among the Gammapy core developer team, they are some experts that are devoted to the maintenance of some sub-packages.
They are in charge of:
- perform initial triage of issues and pull requests,
- supporting developers on tasks associated to the sub-package(s),
- evaluating new pull requests for quality, API consistency and Gammapy coding standards,
- taking care of the global design of the sub-package(s) in the context of the global Gammapy architecture,
- participating to the User Support for questions related to the sub-package(s).
The list of sub-package maintainers is given below:
Maintainer | Sub-package(s) |
---|---|
Quentin Remy (MPIK) | catalog, datasets, modeling |
Atreyee Sinha (GAE-UCM) | datasets, irf, makers |
Contributors
As of March 2021, there have been ~70 different contributors to Gammapy from ~10 countries and ~200 people are subscribed to the Gammapy Slack. An overview of all contributors can be found on GitHub.
There is no useful automatic way to measure how much someone contributed. The most common measure used is commits to the code repository. However the number of commits is not the only a useful measure. Some contributors spent several days to find and fix an important bug, or implement a big and complex feature that only results in a single commit. If someone makes a good bug report or does code review or mentoring or organisational work for Gammapy it does not show up in the commit statistic at all. Please know that any contribution to the Gammapy project is valued!
The list of contributions into conferences, hands-on sessions and schools, and for recipies can be found on the following list:
Supporting institutions
People involved in Gammapy are coming from different institutions, laboratories and universities. We acknowledge them for their daily support. Here are listed the main institutions (alphabetical order):
- AIM (Astrophysique, instrumentation, modélisation), DAp-CEA/CNRS, Saclay/France - Web site
- APC (AstroParticules et Cosmologie), Université de Paris/CNRS, Paris/France - Web site
- DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron), Zeuthen/Germany - Web site
- ECAP (Erlangen Center for Astroparticle Physics), Friedrich-Alexander Univervität, Erlangen/Germany - Web site
- IAA-CSIC (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Granada/Spain - Web site
- INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica), Italy - Web site
- LUTh (Laboratoire Univers et Théorie), CNRS/Observatoire de Paris, Meudon/France - Web site
- MPIK (Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Heidelberg/Germany - Web site
- Observatoire de Paris, Paris-Meudon-Nançay/France - Web site
- UCM (Universidad Complutense Madrid), Madrid/Spain - Web site
- CTAO - Web site
Grants
Several grants have helped to support the development of Gammapy, including:
- ESCAPE H2020 project (European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI research Infrastructure): grant agreemant n. 824064, 2019/2022 in Germany and France (from EU)
- PECORA ANR project: 2019/2022 (from France)
- Action Fédératrice CTA: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (from Observatoire de Paris)
- Action Pluri-annauelle Initiatrice "Astrophysique des hautes énergies": 2022, 2023 (from Observatoire de Paris)
- ASTERICS H2020 project (Astronomy ESFRI & Research Infrastructure Cluster): grant agreement n. 653477, 2015/2019 in France and Spain (from EU)
- Spanish MINECO/AEI projects: FPA2015-69210-C6-3-R, FPA2017-82729-C6-3-R, AYA2016-8089-P (from Spain)