Towards long-term sustainability for napari#
The napari project has had a big year, with lots of new releases, community initiatives, and an expanding core team. In this post, we want to share the work supported by our current grant funding, the ongoing effort required to maintain the project, our current thoughts for ensuring napari’s long-term financial sustainability and the new funding models that we’re exploring to support the project’s needs.
We want your thoughts and feedback, so please fill out this short survey by November 1st to help guide our next steps!
Looking ahead#
You may have noticed a surge of activity in the napari project this year. We’ve been rolling out regular releases, sharing a public roadmap, welcoming new members to the core team, and gearing up for a community hackathon next week! It’s been a busy and inspiring time for the project, and we’re excited about where things are headed.
The CZI Scaffolding Grant (read more in our previous post) has given us the opportunity to increase maintainer time, expand community engagement, and strengthen operations management. With a four-year horizon, this support has provided the breathing room we need to plan ahead with confidence. In addition to paying down technical debt and delivering exciting new features, we’re also laying the groundwork for long-term sustainability and maintenance. As part of this work, we’ve been considering what sort of effort it would take to maintain napari long-term.
Maintaining napari long-term#
We’re lucky to have a passionate and thriving core team, many of whom volunteer their time, as well as an active community that contributes regularly through discussions, issues and pull requests. This close collaboration is at the heart of napari’s success, and we want to make sure we have the capacity to foster this collaboration into the future, with a dedicated community manager.
Maintaining open source software takes a lot of ongoing effort - even just fixing bugs, ensuring compatibility with dependencies, and keeping tests passing requires significant time and attention. On top of that, there are countless “invisible” tasks such as writing documentation, refining infrastructure, and refactoring code for easier maintenance. These activities may not be as visible as releasing new features, but they are essential to keeping the project healthy and reliable. Currently, the scaffolding grant supports up to 2.4 full-time equivalent maintainers to perform both feature development, and the less glamorous maintenance work.
Through the scaffolding grant we’ve also been able to pay a rotating release manager to ensure releases are out the door regularly, and with as few bugs as possible! This role has been indispensable in ensuring stability and consistency in our release process, as well as in communicating updates to the community.
Alongside these technical efforts, there are also important administrative responsibilities: following up on funding opportunities, managing project funds, liaising with NumFOCUS and funders, and organizing steering council and core team meetings. Since April, we’ve introduced the role of an operations manager to ensure we are proactive in how we administer the project, and this has been a great addition to the project.
We think these roles are essential to the long-term functioning of napari: helping sustain project development & maintenance, and support the community of contributors long-term. We are therefore looking at ways to secure continued funding for at least one maintainer, a community manager, a release manager, and an operations manager. Looking further ahead, we’d love to fund additional maintainers, host annual or semi-annual hackathons, and support core team members to attend key conferences and share their work.
Our thoughts about continued funding#
We’re exploring mission-aligned funding options beyond traditional grants, which can be short-lived, limited in scope, and unpredictable. The nature of grant funding makes it difficult to engage maintainers on a long-term basis, as they have no guarantee of continued employment beyond the grant horizon. Aligning project direction with available funding opportunities is also tricky, and can lead to a decreased focus on maintenance, refactoring, and key features that are not “in scope” for a given grant.
Some of the ideas we’ve discussed for generating continued funding include offering dedicated support time with core team members through private office hours (in addition to open, community drop-in hours), providing installation and setup support, running workshops—both virtually and in person—on everything from getting started with napari to building custom plugins, and an easy install license and support package, to help lower the barrier for organizations that want a straightforward way to adopt napari with dedicated assistance.
We want your feedback!#
Before we take the next steps, we’d love to hear from you. We’ve put together a short survey and invite you to share your feedback. Your input will help shape our priorities and ensure napari continues to grow in ways that best serve the community.