Year 3 report (final year)

The following project assessment covers the third and final year of our operations. It covers the dates from 10/2022 through 11/2023.

Brief summary of year 3¶

In year 3 of 2i2c’s operations, we expanded 2i2c’s operations with several new community partnerships, development partnerships, and grant-funded projects to provide guidance to communities that wish to use open source infrastructure for open science. In addition, we underwent significant organizational changes as the team began to feel strain brought on by our increasing commitments. We spent several months introspecting and identifying where we needed to make improvements to our structure and team capacity, and finished the year by hiring critical new roles. As we head into 2024, 2i2c aims to incorporate these roles into our organization and improve our operational model as a result, we then aim to fundraise for the next phase of 2i2c’s organizational growth.

Key outcomes¶

Strategic planning and capacity building for Jupyter in research and education¶

In the final year of this grant, 2i2c significantly expanded its partnerships both in its open science cloud platform, as well as its strategic and development efforts. Below is a table of funds that we raised for a combination of services and grants:

Notable milestones in several major categories are described and linked below.

Notable community partnerships¶

• We began a partnership with the US Greenhouse Gas Center to run Jupyter infrastructure for their data teams.
• We partnered with the CryoCloud project for Cryosphere research. This led to a project leader Tasha Snow receiving a prestigious open science award with AGU.
• We began two new major educational collaborations with the Canadian Callysto project for high school learning as well as running Jupyter infrastructure for UC Merced.

Development efforts¶

• We began a collaboration with GESIS to bring environment building to BinderHub, and documented the outcome of this collaboration in this blog post.
• We began a grant-funded project from CZI that provides interactive computing services for historically marginalized global communities.
• We began a partnership with CILogon for institutional log-ins.
• We brought QGIS to a JupyterHub workflow for earth science communities.
• We began a collaboration pilot with HHMI to provide JupyterHubs for biomedical workflows.

Leadership in open science technology and cloud¶

• We were the co-authors on an NSF award to create open science content and cloud services with Project Pythia.
• We were awarded a NASA TOPS grant to create content and services for analyzing wildfire data with NASA EarthData cloud, a collaboration between 2i2c and MetaDocencia.
• Our Partnerships Lead, Jim Colliander, authored a response to a NASA Call for Proposals on the value of hosted cloud environments for open science. Building the open source science stack.
• The 2i2c team authored a response to a NASA Call for Proposals on the value of ephemeral interactive computing environments. The value of ephemeral interactive computing for open science communities.
• The OpenScapes community gave 2i2c’s open science cloud model a strong endorsement. OpenScapes on their cloud environment with JupyterHub.
• OpenScapes also authored a response to the same NASA Call for Proposals that included a pitch for the value of hosted JupyterHub instances for community learning.

Organizational growth and maturation¶

• We conducted an organization-wide audit to identify our strengths and weaknesses and released the report publicly.
• We created and hired for five new roles on our team (links to descriptions of each below):
  • Partnerships Lead
  • Community Success Lead
  • Technical Content Specialist
  • Product Lead
  • Chief of Staff and Delivery Manager

Facilitating communications and connections within the Jupyter developer community and its stakeholders in research/education¶

In our final year, 2i2c’s team authored more than 700 merged pull requests in key upstream repositories. We also engaged in several major community initiatives listed below.

Jupyter-specific conversations and open source engagement/leadership…

• We released a blog post on Principles for contributing to Open Source and encoded this in our Open Source Strategy section of 2i2c’s team compass.
• Our engineer Georgiana Dolocan published a blog post about her professional journey from Outreachy intern to 2i2c engineer on the Jupyter blog.
• Our engineer Sarah Gibson served as JupyterHub’s Community Strategic Lead and led a cohort of Outreachy interns.
  • We partnered with The Turing Institute on a second phase of JupyterHub’s Community Strategic Lead work, which we will begin later this year.
• We piloted a new form of meeting with the JupyterHub team called the Collaboration Cafe
• We helped the Binder project navigate and adjust to a loss in our cloud infrastructure resources.
• We expanded the Executable Books steering council and led efforts to incorporate many of the project’s repositories into the Jupyter project.

Enabling the execution of projects and collaborations for Jupyter in research and education¶

We did not focus on this goal in the final year of the grant, because we had team capacity from other funds to lead these efforts.

• We created a new role to help improve 2i2c’s system of delivery and planning. This role will lead efforts around this goal in the future.

Artifacts, publications, and software code¶

Blog posts

• Bringing QGIS to Jupyter and JupyterHub via 2i2c’s service
• 2i2c running cloud infrastructure for the US Greenhouse Gas Center
• An organizational report describing 2i2c’s growth bottlenecks and challenges
• Georgiana Dolocan’s journey from Outreachy intern to 2i2c engineer
• Describing our partnership and integration of CILogon for institutional authentication
• Exploring our strategy around ethically engaging with open source communities.
• Our annual update in year 2 of 2i2c’s operations
• Announcing our collaboration around user-driven image building in JupyterHub with GESIS.
• Describing the completion of the GESIS project and the improvements we made
• Introducing JupyterHub’s Outreachy interns
• A new format for JupyterHub’s team meetings: the Collaboration Cafe

Blog posts and videos from community partners about 2i2c

• OpenScapes on their cloud environment with JupyterHub
• CryoCloud’s cloud platform for Cryosphere research

Publications and grants about or by 2i2c

• Analyzing wildfire data with NASA EarthData cloud, a collaboration between 2i2c and MetaDocencia.
• The value of hosted JupyterHub instances for community learning, by the OpenScapes team, in response to a NASA CfP on the value of hosted cloud environments for open science.
• Building the open source science stack by Jim Colliander, in response to a NASA CfP on the value of hosted cloud environments for open science.
• The value of ephemeral interactive computing for open science communities by the 2i2c team, in response to a NASA CfP on the value of hosted cloud environments for open science.

Videos and presentations

• No Magic Added Deploying Multiple JupyterHubs to Multiple Clouds from one Repository, by Sarah Gibson
• Accelerating Discovery for NASA Cryosphere Communities with JupyterHub, James Colliander
• Building a Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Research and Education, Chris Holdgraf
• On Building open source infrastructure for research, education, and local communities, Jim Colliander
• Reproducible computational environments with Binder, by Sarah Gibson
• Embedding a Right to Replicate in Research Software Engineer practices, by Sarah Gibson