[Neurodebian-upstream] NeuroDebian & your projects — let's work together

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

Dear NeuroDebian users and upstream authors of scientific software.

Over the years, NeuroDebian has became a useful resource for
thousands of users.  We've grown from packaging and maintaining two
projects needed for our own research (PyEPL and FSL) to over 60 packages
related to a wide spectrum of computing needs — distributed computing
(e.g., condor, cctools), generic Python modules (e.g., sklearn, pandas),
and various neuroimaging suites (AFNI, CMTK, FSL, etc), just to name a
few.  And software "packaging" is only a single aspect of the project;
much effort has been spent on legalities (licensing), QA, universal
availability, and community outreach.

NeuroDebian nowadays receives contributions from about a dozen developers either
interested in packaging specific tools or seeking wide and easy adoption of
their own projects.  Nevertheless, the core development team is still only two
researchers spreading somewhat thin among all the projects and their research.

To sustain NeuroDebian and keep it growing, we need funding.  Therefore, we
are seeking opportunities from you — our current and prospective users.  If
you plan on submitting a grant proposal where:

- your research relies on NeuroDebian delivering you a stable,
  versatile, and well supported research IT platform;

- you develop open scientific tools and seek a robust build
  infrastructure, improved QA, and wider dissemination through the
  largest software distribution system in the world;

- you aim to share data accessibly and unambigously through Debian's
  common unified package manager;

- you plan to deliver a custom platform deployment or service based
  on NeuroDebian;

- or you touch upon any of the topics that are central to the NeuroDebian team's
  efforts: results reproducibility, methods validation, research software and
  data quality assurance, etc...

Then, please consider collaborating with us.

It is quite possible that your research has already benefited from
NeuroDebian and will continue to benefit from projects we have planned
and initiated (e.g. testkraut, snapshotting repository, data packages,
and there are more!). Including NeuroDebian in your research plans
will ensure its continued availability for the immediate and real
benefit of the entire scientific community.

For example: if you plan to reply to the 2013 NIH Big Data Center call,
we welcome opportunities for collaboration where the NeuroDebian
project could play an integral role in your proposal.

Please reply to team at neuro.debian.net with your collaboration ideas,
information about funding opportunities, etc — we are looking forward
to hearing from you!

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Ph.D.
http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
Senior Research Associate,     Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept.
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik