We are excited to announce that the igraph project will be supported with a grant of $180,000 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the Essential Open Source Software for Science program. It was recognized that igraph fulfills a critical role for providing network analysis in a variety of scientific domains, including biomedical research. The funding will expedite ongoing development efforts, and should result in a 1.0 release of igraph’s C core with a stable, well-documented and supported API.

For years, the development of igraph was done on a voluntary basis. With funding available, we can make sure developers have more time available to dedicate to igraph. In particular, the funding will support Gábor Csárdi, Tamás Nepusz, Szabolcs Horvát, Vincent Traag and Fabio Zanini.

The core of igraph is written in C, but most people use igraph through its high-level interfaces for R, Python or Mathematica. Much of the development effort will be concentrated on the core of igraph, but the high-level interfaces will not be overlooked.

Even though we will dedicate more time to igraph, the project cannot survive without a vibrant community of users and contributors. Whether you reported issues, contributed code or improved the documentation, your contributions remain vital to the project. We hope that our new community forum will enable us to form a tighter and more supportive community, where you can ask questions, support others, or discuss recent advances in network analysis or graph theory.

The project will start from the 1st of September onwards, and will last for a year. The 1.0 version is planned to be released towards the end of the project.