Be scientifically oriented.

NumFOCUS projects contribute to the advancement of scientific research. This means that the project either enables some new research challenges to be addressed or makes addressing research challenges significantly better (i.e. – faster, easier, simpler). This often means that the project has dependencies on or integrations with existing NumFOCUS projects.

While NumFOCUS projects typically take the form of an open community maintaining a software package, other types of non-software projects may still qualify. For example, projects with educational goals particular to scientific computing can be a good fit. See, for example, QuantEcon.

NumFOCUS supports projects that are part of a wider community; in the case of software projects, this would mean being interoperable with other projects in the same ecosystem. We support projects in various languages, including Python, Julia, R, C++, and JavaScript. Because NumFOCUS occupies itself with scientific tools, general-purpose projects (IDEs, utilities, programming languages, build systems, etc.) are typically not a good fit.