Hi All - just an update. We have an invitation from SLOAN to submit a proposal and will be working on a proposal over the next few weeks (due on January 18) that if successfully will give us two years of real effort on this p roject!! yay! I welcome any input or feedback during this time and will be reaching out to some of you for support and feedback and letters of suppport over the next few weeks.
Have a wonderful holiday / end of the year season everyone.
More to come.
Leah
Oh in case anyone is still here (i know it’s been a while!!) if anyone knows o f or has access to stats on the python community - demographics (gender, diversity etc), duplicate packages (ie there are like 10 different packages for the twitter API), Challenges for scientists in this community (lack of a home like R / R studio, etc please feel free to share them with me.
Let me know if I can help out in any way? 
Dunno if this helps at all regarding demographics - 2020 Statistics On Python And R Communities - home? There is also the Python Developers Survey 2019 though it only really has a breakdown by age.
There are numerous duplicate packages in PyPi and it can be a challenge determining which is the most appropriate to use. Generally the most well maintained would have a relatively recent release date. I also tend to rely on the number of stars the project has on GitHub, which you can see if you click through to the project details. I would find it useful to be able to filter by this in PyPi, but unfortunately that functionality isn’t available.
In terms of RStudio, I used to like Rodeo as an IDE, though it is no longer developed/supported. Spyder is probably the next best thing. Though most people are focusing their efforts on Jupyter these days. That being said RStudio now has integrations for Python and R (R & Python: A Love Story - RStudio) and I feel this help to bring together both the rOpenSci and pyOpenSci communities.
thank you for this!
our proposal is being reviewed NOW! should have feedback within a week - fingers crossed!