The PlasmaPy Project: Building an open source ecosystem for plasma science

The mission of the PlasmaPy project is to foster the creation of a fully open source Python ecosystem for plasma research and education. The PlasmaPy package is being developed to include the common core functionality needed by plasma physicists across disciplines. PlasmaPy prioritizes code readability, consistency, and maintainability while using best practices for scientific computing such as open development, version control, continuous integration testing, and code review. We will describe PlasmaPy's current capabilities, and describe new capabilities related to dispersion relation solvers, Thomson scattering, and magnetic topology. We will present code development plans for the next year, describe how PlasmaPy 0.7.0 was launched into space, and discuss how anyone in the community is welcome to contribute to the project. *Ongoing development of PlasmaPy is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, with many contributions from the broader plasma physics and open source communities. Past development of PlasmaPy has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, and Google Summer of Code