Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is Supporting Bokeh
Tags: Science, Data Visualization, Bokeh, Open Source, Grant

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is Supporting Bokeh Bokeh Follow Nov 19 · 4 min read

We are excited to announce that Bokeh has been awarded a grant of $250,000 USD by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative! The funding will help improve Bokeh for academic use-cases. Besides general maintenance of the project, two new features will be added to Bokeh — support for mathematical text in Bokeh plots, and SVG outputs for plot layouts.

We’re pleased to be collaborating with Makepath for this initiative. Makepath is a data science company that develops data-intensive applications with a focus on distributed computing, web service architectures, and data visualization. Makepath personnel were active Bokeh contributors in the past, and we can’t wait to work with them again!

About Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Across three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education, and Justice & Opportunity, they’re pairing engineering with grant-making, impact investing, and policy and advocacy work to help build an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.

As part of their Open Science work, CZI’s Essential Open Source Software for Science program supports software maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for critical open-source tools. Through three distinct rounds of funding, CZI has awarded $11.8 million USD to support over 67 open source projects.

Proposed Work

Bokeh has three main goals for this initiative:

Add support for mathematical notations in Bokeh plots

Extend SVG outputs to plot layouts

Focus on project maintenance and sustainability

LaTeX is widely used in academia for typesetting mathematical text in scientific documents. In order to make Bokeh more useful for academic journal outputs, the capability to use mathematical notations (using standard LaTeX syntax) will be added to Bokeh. This capability will be added to all text rendered inside plots, e.g plot titles, axis and tick labels, and annotations. It will also extend to selected Bokeh widgets, such as the Div widget.

Bokeh can generate SVG outputs for individual plots, including individual plots in a layout, like gridplot. A single SVG export encompassing an entire layout will be more convenient to use in journals and other publications. The capability to generate these SVG outputs for plot layouts will be improved. The feature will be easy-to-use and thoroughly documented. It will also integrate well with the support for mathematical text to allow SVG outputs for plots that have LaTeX syntax.

Bokeh users have invested their time and effort to utilize Bokeh for their own use-case and projects, and want the project to continue to be active and supported. With a focus on general maintenance, we want to ensure steady or increasing project momentum. The project’s ongoing needs around documentation, bug fixing, and infrastructure will have dedicated resources. In addition, we will work to develop a pipeline of new contributors and future leaders within the project team.

Significance of Proposed Work

As of November 2020, Bokeh has nearly 1.4M package install per month, with around 80K regular documentation visitors. Bokeh has been referenced in over 500 biomedical research scholarly papers, and over 450 projects have a dependency on Bokeh. These metrics suggest that a substantial number of Bokeh users will benefit from active maintenance and project improvements.

The proposed features have been highly anticipated over the years. Supporting mathematical content is an upvoted feature in the Bokeh tracker. SVG for plot layouts is requested in multiple external sites and projects. These features also affect downstream projects, like Holoviews.

Bokeh conducted a “Bokeh in Biosciences” survey in May 2019 and July 2020 to understand how the bioscience community uses bokeh. We learnt that most of the responders use Bokeh for presentations in journals and websites. A significant number of users also asked specifically for the proposed features.

Project Roadmap

Development will officially begin in January 2021 and will continue throughout the year. The work plan has been divided into four phases — onboarding, followed by 3 months of focused work on each of the mentioned tasks. Follow the discussion on Bokeh’s Slack, on the #czi channel.

Bokeh’s general roadmap has been documented on the website. Besides development, the project also needs help with documentation, design, testing, outreach, and more. If you are interested in contributing, say “Hi!” to us on Slack, we would love to hear from you!

Thanks for your support!

We extend our deepest gratitude to Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for funding Bokeh, and a huge thanks to Brendan Collins and Makepath for collaborating with Bokeh for this program. We’re super thrilled to be working with you!

We’d like to thank Sumana Harihareshwara, the founder of Changeset Consulting, for her invaluable help with the EOSS application process. Sumana is a member of the PSF Project Funding Working Group, and has spearheaded multiple successful grant writing initiatives.

Thanks to the “Bokeh in Biosciences” survey responders. Your inputs played a key role in shaping the project goals. We look forward to keeping in touch!

We would also like to thank Bokeh’s existing sponsors — NumFOCUS, Blackstone, Anaconda, NVIDIA, RAPIDS, Quansight, REX, and Nom Nom Data for helping support Bokeh’s infrastructure costs. A very special thanks to Bokeh’s core team for making sure the project runs smoothly every day. Lastly, thanks to all the Bokeh users and contributors who keep this project alive and active.