Reviving the SciPy India community

Aditi Juneja and Agriya Khetarpal

and h/t the rest of the scientific Python community in India

2009

Organised by Jarrod Millman and Prabhu Ramachandran

at the Society For Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE), Kerala, India

Six-day conference with two tracks

2021

i.e., the last time the conference was organised. Hiatus since then.

Two-day conference, one track, one day of workshops and another for talks. No sprints.

Rising from the ashes

in 2025, with the "SciPy India Community Calls"

Friendly timings for European mornings and Indian evenings (1000–1200 UTC)

Hosted online on Jitsi and livestreamed to the FOSS United YouTube channel

Thanks to Kai Striega from SciPy/the Sydney Python Community for helping us early on!

Highlights from the first few community calls

Themes: network science, astrophysics and astronomy, time series

~20 attendees on average

We need more researchers talking about how they're using scientific packages, and less maintainers

Building in the open

GitHub repositories we use to coordinate plans:

scipy-india/proposal-reviewing for incoming talk and workshop proposals

scipy-india/planning for a public record of our plans

Public Zulip instance for communication

Collaborations in the works (🤞🏻)

Pint of Science festival

India Ecoacoustics Network

The LIGO-India gravitational waves detection project

Our first offline event

FOSS in Science devroom, IndiaFOSS 2025

https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025/devrooms/science

Conference?

We're looking at April 2026 as a potential time.

Venues are available across Bangalore and Mumbai, and prices are not too high.

Educational institutions; such that we can get access to subsidised dormitories and guest houses for attendees.

Sponsors

A SciPy India micro-fund with proceedings towards continued organisation over the next bunch of years

1500-2000€ for the highest tier, and cascading downwards

Python Software Foundation grants

Other grantmakers should we ask around for funding?

Requests: diversity grants, travel/accommodation grants,

Open questions

• Should we try to recreate the SciPy Proceedings papers for India, or explore a JOSS tie-up with the Scientific Python track at PyCon AU?

• How do we get enough sponsor money?

• Advertising is a problem – we don't have enough reach on social media and no funds.

• How do we scale the community calls to have upwards of fifty attendees and newcomers every time?

Get involved

All details enclosed in https://scipy-india.github.io

Social media:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/scipyindia/ https://bsky.app/profile/scipyindia.bsky.social https://fosstodon.org/@scipyindia

Please volunteer!

Thank you for listening!