(this post is by Charles)

Calling all members of the Stan community to action!

We’re renewing the Stan Governing Body. The SGB co-organizes StanCon and related events (such as StanConnect!), works on initiatives to fund developers, and more generally helps set the directions of the project.

From the Stan forum:

We’re renewing the Stan Governing Body (SGB) with all 5 seats up for grabs. Current SGB members may still run, however they are not guaranteed to preserve their seats. As in previous years, we will use the Stan forum for nominations.

Please respond to this post to self-nominate for either a 1-year or 2-year term on the SGB before April 14th. We encourage all nominees to briefly summarize their experiences with Stan and their goals for the SGB. Feel free to add links to any content you think is relevant. And if you know someone who you think would be a good fit for the SGB please let them know and encourage them to nominate themselves.

You can find more details on the original post.

 

On a more personal note…

On a more personal note, I have decided to not run for a third term. Serving for two years has been an immense privilege.

It doesn’t take much reflection to realize what an integral part of my career Stan has been (and continues to be). I discovered Stan during my first job out of college at Metrum Research Group: I was contributing to the C++ library and building features which would enable applications in Pharmacometrics. My first pull request was the matrix exponential function in 2016. My first research poster was titled “Stan functions for pharmacometrics.” My first conference talk was at StanCon 2017, aka the inaugural StanCon. The project and the people working on it encouraged me—even empowered me—to pursue a PhD in Statistics, which I did at Columbia with, as my advisor, the illustrious stranger who created this blog. Throughout the years, Stan has connected me to people, both in statistics and in many applied domains.

I must recognize that, as I dove deeper into academia, I started dedicating less and less time to Stan. I remember during my first year in grad school proposing, as a final class project, adding a new feature to Stan. The prof told that me that such work was important for the scientific community but that I needed to find something that was conceptually more substantive. I was also given a clear signal that the PhD program was to train researchers, not engineers.

It’s unfortunate that incentives in academia often misalign with the goals of developing (and maintaining!) high-quality open-source software—at least in the short term. What the creators of Stan pulled off in an academic context was remarkable and unorthodox. In the end, it took an international collaboration across academia and industry to carry the project. I can’t do everyone justice, so I’ll refer you to the list of developers.

I have often felt torn between my work as a researcher and as an engineer. Sure, sometimes you can align the goals: I did leverage that final class project to build a prototype feature in Stan and wrote a research paper on it. But this anecdote strikes me more as the exception than the rule. Even after I started working at the Flatiron Institute—an institution that champions the development of scientific software and hires full-time software engineers—I only devoted so much time to Stan. My colleague Brian Ward jokes that during my almost 3 years here, he has never seen me write any C++ (and I almost haven’t). I’m embarrassed by how much time it’s taken me to write up documentation on our suite of HMM functions; I’m not very active on the Stan forum; and it is now a StanCon tradition to have someone publicly bash me for not finishing Stan’s integrated Laplace approximation (this month I hope—Steve Bronder and I are one unit test away from completing the C++ pull request. Steve has done a lot of work to create a clean user interface.)

The reality is that I’ll never get to work full time on Stan like I did before the PhD. And I suppose that’s ok. I enjoy the “conceptual” work—that is the more methodological/theoretical research that I’ve been doing, and I trust that some of it is useful to Stan users and to the broader Bayesian modeling community. I’m actually very fond of my non-Stan collaborators—if you can believe it! But the feeling of not doing enough for Stan… yeah, that’s a real thing.

Two years ago, when the announcement for the SGB election was posted, I saw an opportunity to devote more time to the Stan project in a structured manner. The SGB does a lot and I focused on bringing back StanCon. Concretely, I co-organized StanCon’23 and StanCon’24, and laid the groundwork for StanCon’26 (yes, we’re taking a one-year break). I liked working on these conferences. Sure, it’s work, but a lot of people generously contribute their time, and if the tasks are properly delegated, it all becomes very manageable. Ultimately, it’s very rewarding to see a vision brainstormed over a zoom call come to life when we all gather, say, at a pub in Oxford, and streams of colleagues we haven’t see in months, sometimes years, keep pouring in and gathering around a large table.

I also believe that StanCon is the best applied Bayesian conference out there. Period. And I think its participants benefit immensely from attending—whether by learning a lot from the tutorials or exchanging ideas with top experts. We’re a community of doers.

I hope the next batch of SGB members will tackle this opportunity with the same ambition and pride that the past bodies have displayed. And even as some of us move on, we’ll be here to insure a smooth transition and provide support where we can.