Migration to Git/Github

A small, hopefully useful data point from the perspective of the scientific python community: pretty much all of the major scientific python projects are on github, and as a loosely-coupled ecosystem of related projects, we benefit enormously from that. IPython, Numpy, Scipy, matplotlib, pandas, scikit-learn, scikit-image, statsmodels, cython, ... have all moved to Github and use mostly identical workflows. 

This was not an accident: IPython was one of the first to make the move, and when others started considering transitions, I actually jumped into several mailing list discussions to try to support a common move to github. I figured that it would benefit our community to be able to fluidly move across projects, as casual contributors would be likely to be interested in participating in more than one project. After a few projects made the switch to GH, it wasn't even necessary to argue anymore in favor of that choice, as it became the natural default. And we've certainly seen a great benefit across projects, and even beyond: not only do scientists contribute to many of these tools, it has also now become common for many to post their research and educational materials (often as IPython notebooks shared via nbviewer.ipython.org) on github.

So for us, there's a real, significant benefit from having multiple projects sharing a common workflow based on github: people can use their limited time to actually make a contribution, rather than spend all of it figuring out a highly bespoke workflow like Python's. I can say that at least for me, that very bespoke workflow is a real barrier to contributing: I simply don't have the time to learn all the ways in which the Python process is unique and different from pretty much everything else out there in order to make a small contribution. 

And from our perspective in the scientific python world, we really want to capture such occasional contributions by keeping barriers low: not only does it encourage a diverse community even from one-off submissions, you never know who starts that way and becomes the next major person in a project.  The only thing that keeping a high barrier to new entrants helps is to keep the 'old boys club' in place. At least in the scientific python space, we're trying as hard as we can to break that mindset down.  So I'm very happy to see these efforts also from Python itself, even if it's only partial at this point. Much better than nothing!