[BLOG TITLE HERE] 2i2c's value at JupyterCon (per Yuvi's experience) #548
Description
What happened?
- Yuvi went to JupyterCon, and observed how people's mention of 2i2c came up organically throughout the conference
- Here's an edited dump of the report
Reliably running a hub service is a fungible commodity that anyone can do. It's not a specialized skillset. Reliably running a service accessed over the web is a multi-billion dollar industry with a lot of commoditized knowledge. It's a necessary part of what we do, and we have to do it well to exist within this space, but that's not the unique value we add.
The unique value we add is that we help communities navigate the fairly complex and fast moving ecosystem of interactive computing, by helping them make choices that work for them. We do this by understanding their needs, understanding the ecosystem, and both making connections when they exist, and creating new ones (in ways that integrate with the existing ecosystem) when necessary.
This is a little bit like consulting, but not exactly - we aren't doing this work bespoke to one community. We're able to do this because we have experience in other communities, and are able to fairly authoritatively speak for them. For example, we could be in a meeting with Earthscope and say 'this is how openscapes does it, for these reasons, and it works well for them' - in that moment, we are speaking as a member of the openscapes community, and that's not wrong. That's not a privilege a consultant has. So while our work has elements of consulting in it, that's not what we're doing. But we have a lot to learn from that as well.
If I think of 2i2c's overall mission as 'bring the principles of free software and open source into 2020s', this JupyterCon feels like a good big honking win. We are letting people specialize into the roles they want to do, instead of the roles they have to do. I like it.
Why should we be excited about it?
- Because A
- Because B
Where can we learn more?
- Link A
- Link B
Media and images
Acknowledgements
- To tasha and sarah wilson, who formed nucleii of many thoughtful conversations around this
- Post published.
- Shared on socials
- Shared in the team Slack.
- (If applicable) Emailed to the partner/community member who was featured.