Cycle 5: Aperio Software participation in release team and OpenAstronomy infrastructure

finance/proposal-calls/cycle5/aperio_release.md

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+### Title
+
+Release team and shared infrastructure
+
+### Project team
+
+This proposal is to fund the following people at [Aperio Software](https://aperiosoftware.com):
+
+* Thomas Robitaille
+* Stuart Mumford
+
+This could also fund other individuals working at Aperio Software if required.
+
+### Project Description / Scope of Work
+
+This project covers:
+
+* Participation in the release team, including carrying out releases in the core package and working on general infrastructure for releases
+* Maintenance and development of the shared OpenAstronomy tooling and infrastructure, mainly related to continuous integration and releases
+
+### Roadmap Items
+
+Release efforts in general are not mentioned in the roadmap because they have worked well in the last few years and therefore are not a priority for improving. However, it is important that release work be funded, otherwise there will not be any releases of the astropy core package.
+
+Some of the release team work will involve working towards the following roadmap item:
+
+- :large_orange_diamond: Encourage usage of the core and coordinated package ecosystem more directly (e.g., provide an `astropy-ecosystem` metapackage, or change `astropy` to `astropy-core` and make `astropy` the metapackage).
+
+### Project / Work / Deliverables
+
+#### Release team
+
+Robitaille is a member of the Astropy project release team, which is responsible for carrying out releases of the core package as well as coordinating release infrastructure across the project and helping improve release pipelines for other packages in the organization. Part of the funding will therefore be used to continue supporting these efforts.
+
+As part of this, Robitaille will investigate solutions to encourage the use of coordinated packages, including the possibility of making an astropy ecosystem meta-package as described in the roadmap item above.
+
+#### OpenAstronomy shared infrastructure
+
+The OpenAstronomy project holds some infrastructure projects shared between Astropy, SunPy and other packages. As part of this proposal Robitaille and Mumford will continue to contribute to and maintain the following projects:
+
+* https://github.com/OpenAstronomy/github-actions-workflows
+* https://github.com/OpenAstronomy/build-python-dist
+* https://github.com/OpenAstronomy/sphinx-changelog
+* https://github.com/OpenAstronomy/publish-wheels-anaconda
+
+This will include collaborating with the Scientific Python project on reducing duplication with their efforts.
+
+### Approximate Budget
+
+The budget assumes an hourly rate of USD 150. Over the calendar year of 2026,
+the estimated effort is:
+
+* 40 hours for regular releases of the core astropy package and other release committee work
+* 40 hours for work on the shared OpenAstronomy infrastructure
+
+This gives a total of 80 hours x USD 150 = USD 12,000
+
+If funding is limited, a minimum useful budget would be 3/4 of this, so **USD 9,000**.
+
+### Period of Performance
+
+Jan 1, 2026 to Dec 31, 2026