2i2c value proposition refresh
The following slides describe 2i2c’s refined understanding of its value proposition to communities and to the world. It should be used to guide our public communications and service direction. We also include several supporting slides to bring the value proposition to life.
Questions for feedback
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The world has become data-driven. Access to interactive computing environments is critical for creating and sharing knowledge.
To learn and create together, communities need easy access to the right tools, and the knowledge to use them effectively.
Communities often build and manage their own hosted infrastructure with open source tools. Managing infrastructure is a distraction from their mission to create and share knowledge.
Communities often do so alone and with limited resources. They do not efficiently collaborate and learn from one another along the way.
We need infrastructure services that are driven by community needs and values, that follow the same open source science practices we wish to see in others, and that believe in the power of shared community resources and knowledge.
A global network of community hubs for interactive learning and discovery
Our interactive computing platform gives your community a digital home to create and share knowledge, and a global network of communities to learn from.
Our interactive computing platform empowers communities to design a hub for their unique workflows.
An interactive computing hub for your community.
Data
Content
Tools
Your community members, anywhere in the world.
Interactive computing hubs provide frictionless access to tools that connect, create, and share knowledge using data.
Each hub gives administrators tools to design and provide computational environments that users connect to via a web browser.
Hubs offer users several interactive interfaces to let users explore data and create new ideas and workflows.
Hubs come with a community knowledge base that lets you share computational narratives and explanations.
By managing hubs as hosted infrastructure, community members can focus on workflows that create and share knowledge.
Share externally for public discovery
Discovery
and learning
Exploration
Iteration / collaboration
Authoring
Sharing
Share internally for community learning
Open tools and standards allow users to bring local workflows to the cloud, and communities to replicate their hub without 2i2c.
Local workflows
2i2c managed hub
Community managed hub
Shared hub environments allow communities to�grow and learn together and share new tools and knowledge
New data
New tools
New knowledge
New members
New experts
New collaborations
Open science
Open source
By reusing standard open source tools, hubs provide familiar workflows and facilitate learning across communities
Climate modeling community
Neuroscience collaboration
Sociology�classroom
Interactive computing platform
Open source ecosystem of tools and standards
We learn from our user communities and collaborate with open source communities to improve these tools.
We collaborate with open source communities to make improvements.
We integrate open source tools for community hubs.
We work with communities and learn how open source tools could improve.
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By working with a large and diverse network of communities, we can identify the improvements that have the most impact.
Climate modeling community
Neuroscience collaboration
Sociology�classroom
Our interactive computing platform forms a global network of communities that rapidly spread new ideas and enhancements.
Our interactive computing platform forms a global network of communities that rapidly spread new ideas and enhancements.
We ground our service in open principles so communities can trust us as stewards of critical scientific workflows.
Transparency
Empowerment
Partnership
Our communities are partners working towards shared impact, not customers to grow revenue.
Our service gives communities agency to design the service they need, and to manage it without 2i2c if they wish.
Our transparent and participatory model keeps our incentives aligned with community needs.
See openscholarlyinfrastructure.org for principles that inspire 2i2c’s model.
Sustainability
Our service should have a self-sustaining model that ensures continuity, growth, and funder independence.
How 2i2c’s platform enables open science and learning.
Enabling global access to research infrastructure: The Catalyst Project
Goal: Serve biomedical communities in historically marginalized countries.
Funded by: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Highlights: Sponsored access to the hub network for communities that cannot pay. Multi-partner collaboration with different contributions. Experiments with service governance and community representation.
Learning: Extra support needed for global communities (e.g. microgrants), importance of local knowledge / context, importance of teaching and training
Enabling data science education at scale: Data 8 and Inferential Thinking
Goal: Provide content and infrastructure for data science education in California.
Funded by: CloudBank and 2i2c.
Highlights: Textbook written once, used in dozens of classes. Custom datascience package facilitates learning. Lowered the bar to teaching this course for many community colleges.
Learning: Giving people curricula, content, and infrastructure goes a long way to adoption. Communities want to remix content for their specific needs.
data8.org
Enabling reproducible publishing: A public demonstration of Spyglass.
Goal: Help scientists learn about the Spyglass toolbox paper with interactive and reproducible environments.
Funded by: HHMI.
Highlights: An ephemeral hub provides rapid, temporary access to a computational environment built by the Spyglass team. They link to this hub from a pre-print for quick interaction.
Learning: Importance of sharing outside of the community in safe ways. Value of combining interactive environments with scholarly papers.
Growing shared community practices for research: Cryocloud.
Goal: Accelerate discovery and enhance collaboration for NASA Cryosphere communities.
Funded by: NASA.
Highlights: Provides access to icepyx, a shared package for analysis. Facilitated access to NASA data. Workshops with feedback and rapid iteration expanded hub functionality.
Learning: Importance of rapid iteration on hub environment with feedback. Supporting community leaders can lead to self-organizing and growth. Communities often grow to encompass new domains.
Spreading cloud-native workflows with cookbooks: Project Pythia and Pangeo
Goal: Create cookbooks and training for the geoscientific Python community.
Funded by: NASA.
Highlights: Collection of cookbooks cover major workflows in geospatial analysis. Written in Jupyter Book and MyST Markdown. Led to new development of execution engine in MyST document engine.
Learning: Development should be driven by clear community use-cases. Importance of unifying experience in JupyterLab vs. reading. Many communities shared the same need.
Identifying shared needs across communities: User environment building with GESIS and NASA VEDA
Goal: Generalize user-driven environment building from GESIS project to upstream functionality.
Funded by: GESIS (social sciences institute)
Highlights: Took an in-house implementation and generalized it to upstream contribution. Upstream contribution meant that any community can use the feature now. Quickly got requests to deploy in NASA VEDA community.
Learning: Upstream contributions may require significant re-structuring of a working prototype. Important to coordinate heavily with upstream community. Tight feedback loops are key.
Providing best-practices in infrastructure globally: Security fixes for the 2i2c network.
Goal: Ensure that communities were not affected by a Jupyter security vulnerability.
Funded by: 2i2c.
Highlights: JupyterHub team discovered a security vulnerability aided by 2i2c. Internal communication let 2i2c help make a fix, and prepare hubs before public release. Hub network let us push a fix immediately. No communities affected.
Learning: Having internal access to Jupyter team helped get us key information early. Knowledge of JupyterHub let us make upstream fixes quickly. Need better ways of quickly communicating with hub leaders.
pangeo.io
Lessons from our first three years, and focus areas for our next three years
Co-development of open source�and open science is critical.�How can we scale co-development with communities?
Open science transformation depends�on social innovation and knowledge sharing.�How can we facilitate social innovation across hubs?
People are willing to pay but�with large disparities in ability to do so.�How can we bootstrap a globally sustainable model?
Our progress in our first three years�See here for a three-year retrospective: 2i2c.org/report-czi-2021
Here’s where you can learn more about our organization during this time.
Our team compass has all of our organizational strategy and knowledge.
We work openly and make our operations accessible. See our infrastructure repository for all our tech.
We provide organizational and strategy updates via our blog.
compass.2i2c.org
The landing page of our Team Compass
The Right to Replicate gives communities the right to replicate their infrastructure in its entirety elsewhere, with or without 2i2c.
2i2c.org/right-to-replicate
We’ve grown a network of more than 80 communities and 6,000 monthly users. We’ve made more than 2,000 upstream Pull Requests.
Our interactive computing platform forms a global network of communities that grow and learn from one another.
Estimated locations for several active communities in April 2024.�See our interactive map of running hubs for current communities.
How you can support us
How you can support our collaboration
We’re currently planning and fundraising for the next phase of our organization. Here are a few ways we’re looking for help.
Reach out to us: If you’re interested in supporting or joining 2i2c’s network, send an e-mail to partnerships@2i2c.org.
Appendix slides
Our platform is for communities that create and share knowledge
2i2c helps communities that push our collective knowledge forward. Here are a few key types of communities in 2i2c’s network:
Education�communities | produce new cohorts of people with more knowledge. |
Research�communities | produce advances at the frontier of knowledge |
Applied knowledge�communities | produce societal-benefits using advances at the frontier of knowledge. |
The open source ecosystem provides community-driven tools and standards for interactive learning and discovery.
Produced by many communities, removes dependence on a single vendor.
Provides all the tools needed to effectively create and share knowledge.
Constantly improving through joint contributions from the public and private sector.
Provides more resilient and replicable workflows with many contributors.
Open science is a continuous process, not an end state
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whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/01/11/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-actions-to-advance-open-and-equitable-research/
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure:�Towards an ecosystem of service providers for open knowledge communities.
openscholarlyinfrastructure.org
The enshittification lifecycle: A common anti-pattern of private SaaS
Enshittification happens because the “value capture” phase makes the product significantly worse for those that cannot pay. At this point, you’d better hope that this service is not a key part of your workflow…
Don’t build castles in other people’s kingdoms
Rule #1: Build your castle on land you own
Rule #2: Shamelessly use the other kingdoms just like they are using you!
Rule #3: Always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom.
Rule #4: Operate like your castle can get shutdown tomorrow.
Rule #5: Be suspicious of new kingdoms that give away free stuff.
Rule #6: Give good reasons to go back to the Castle in your Kingdom. And be persistent!
howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/
Sandbox and unfinished slides
Put stuff here that is unfinished or that we might want to cut but aren’t yet ready to delete.
A global network of community hubs for�interactive learning and discovery
The International Interactive Computing Collaboration
Our interactive computing hubs give communities their own home in the cloud for interactive discovery. They form a global network of learning within and between communities.
Each hub is designed with a common set of open tools that allow users to rapidly explore, discover, and share knowledge with computation and data.
Communities need service providers that don’t require them to compromise on agency and ownership.
Communities need a way to deploy open science services for their needs. They need digital spaces that feel “theirs”, that are tailored for their unique needs and problems, and that they have control over.
But they need assistance in designing, deploying, and managing these services. Communities don’t have the staffing resources to manage a complex cloud-based service, and need a trustworthy partner to reduce the work, uncertainty, risk involved in doing so.
They need a service partner that aligns with their goals and values and understands their problems. This would allow them to focus on their research goals while delegating platform management to a trusted party.