Bonsai Foundation

The Bonsai Foundation is a Community Interest Company (CIC) incorporated in England and Wales for the benefit of the community of users of the Bonsai visual programming language, and associated projects, in the United Kingdom and worldwide, and more generally, for the benefit of any members of the scientific research community, and other professionals, hobbyists, and artists wishing to learn, use, or contribute to the Bonsai ecosystem.

Community Interest Statement

The primary role of the Bonsai Foundation is to organise the development of the Bonsai ecosystem, and support the short-, medium-, and long-term goals of its user and developer community. This is achieved by promoting and facilitating the sharing of contributions between individuals and organisations who want to volunteer their work for community projects.

We work to establish clear contribution guidelines, organise the development roadmap, and administer and moderate the code repositories and user forums to enable cooperation and coordination between all stakeholders in the Bonsai community. By actively maintaining the development and support infrastructure of the Bonsai project, the Bonsai Foundation creates a sustainable culture of open collaboration for the benefit of the Bonsai community.

The Bonsai Foundation is also responsible for developing and improving access to freely available teaching materials, documentation, and community projects. We do this by organising conferences and summer courses, hackathons, residencies, and other events, both online and in-person to support the sharing of knowledge and experience across the community.

Our goal is to empower current and future generations of scientists anywhere in the world to use this free and open-source programming language for developing their own experimental instruments, and quickly recombining and repurposing state-of-the-art technology. By making all content freely available to everyone and facilitating knowledge exchange between community members worldwide, we create a more inclusive and diverse environment for scientific and technical research and education.