Updating pricing and sole source guide

[choldgraf]

This is a slight overhaul of our pricing and service description. The reason for this is because we've had recent requests for a price reasonableness statement, as well as a sole source justification statement. Rather than maintaining two separate Google Docs for these, I thought I'd try incorporating the text into our service docs in order to de-duplicate information, and to make it more discoverable.

This PR does a few major things:

• Our pricing now has a dedicated section w/ sub-sections. This includes a cost justification as well as a rough comparison to other services. This is meant for re-use with 'price reasonableness' requests.
• Our service docs now include a page that describes 2i2c's unique capability to provide these services for our communities. This is meant for re-use with 'sole source justification' requests.

There's also some general language cleanup and restructuring.

I'd love to see @colliand's thoughts on this in particular, to make sure that we are painting a decent picture of ourselves here.

See the About the service page in the preview to check out the changes.

Open questions

• Is the scope and content good? Is it too wordy?
• Are we mis-representing anything, or under-selling ourselves?
• Is it OK to post our prices and process in a more public space like this, rather than using a Google doc link?
• How should we pair this information with the "brochure-style" information at 2i2c.org?

[damianavila]

I am not sure if you should drop "amounts" here, mostly because it will get out of date pretty soon. Maybe you can reformulate this one in percentage terms?

[choldgraf]

As in % FTE? Maybe we could just say something more vague like A 100% cloud engineer may cost upwards of $200,000 a year after considering benefits and overhead.?

[colliand]

Damian's feedback is wise. That said, I propose an alternate path for the edits. I suggest we retain the dollar amounts informing the cost structure but include a link or two that points to comparable salaries. The text should reference a date like ("In 2022, the average salary for a Site Reliability Engineer is ....") and a new sentence saying that 2i2c will constantly revisit costs and adjust service pricing.

A theme I've been exploring that is not widely present in 2i2c's documentation is that "interactive computing should be a public good". No one should have to pay to use the alphabet to communicate. A decade-scale goal for 2i2c is to facilitate the availability of interactive computing to transform the way research and education is carried out. Interactive Computing is a modern analogue of telephone service and will be required for successful participation in democracy.

[arnim]

Thank you for putting this together. Having some form of citable documentation on how much development costs is priceless in communicating with administrations. I fully agree with @colliand that including points to comparable salaries in the documentation would even make it better, especially for academic institutions.

[choldgraf]

Thanks for that feedback! We've added that to the doc here: https://github.com/2i2c-org/docs/pull/132/files#diff-6ad2356a04852d0c1b65a04341fe38612743628108ab7c1e43b27ed8db03a754R32 does that look good?

[damianavila]

Do you really want to be explicit about other companies' names? I understand that in an internal gdocs, but for a public website, I think it might be a little bit too much...

[choldgraf]

Great question - hmm, is there some other resource we could point to in order to help others understand the landscape? I was trying to provide some helpful pointers here, but understand your point that this is maybe "too opinionated".

[colliand]

Damian is wise here. Namechecking Anaconda but not mentioning Saturn Cloud or Coiled? I suggest that we omit explicit names of companies at this stage and develop a collective view on how 2i2c interacts with partner companies. We need to define criteria that provides guidance for which companies we can endorse, etc.

[colliand]

I may be wrong on the "no names" advice in comment above. I see that more companies are listed below, including Google Colab. The transparency here is confident and consistent with 2i2c's open approach.

[rabernat]

I'll disagree with the comments--I think it's nice to frame 2i2c as part of an ecosystem of companies and consultants. These consulting companies are different from product companies like Coiled or Saturn.

[choldgraf]

how about I add a note at the top of the page that notes we'll list similar services and companies, but in a way that is non-exhaustive and not an "endorsement"? I see 2i2c's role as a connector and an integrator in this space, so I think there is some value in providing visibility of other services so long as it doesn't seem like we are "picking favorites". I'll try adding this in the next commit and we can compare.

[colliand]

I like the changes! Thanks @choldgraf . I shared word-smithing feedback.

[colliand]

Damian's feedback is wise. That said, I propose an alternate path for the edits. I suggest we retain the dollar amounts informing the cost structure but include a link or two that points to comparable salaries. The text should reference a date like ("In 2022, the average salary for a Site Reliability Engineer is ....") and a new sentence saying that 2i2c will constantly revisit costs and adjust service pricing.

A theme I've been exploring that is not widely present in 2i2c's documentation is that "interactive computing should be a public good". No one should have to pay to use the alphabet to communicate. A decade-scale goal for 2i2c is to facilitate the availability of interactive computing to transform the way research and education is carried out. Interactive Computing is a modern analogue of telephone service and will be required for successful participation in democracy.

[colliand]

Damian is wise here. Namechecking Anaconda but not mentioning Saturn Cloud or Coiled? I suggest that we omit explicit names of companies at this stage and develop a collective view on how 2i2c interacts with partner companies. We need to define criteria that provides guidance for which companies we can endorse, etc.

[colliand]

I may be wrong on the "no names" advice in comment above. I see that more companies are listed below, including Google Colab. The transparency here is confident and consistent with 2i2c's open approach.

[colliand]

The phrasing "We are heavily biased" can be improved. Perhaps: "2i2c's view is that interactive computing is emerging as the vital medium for communications in research and education communities. As a result, we suggest that universities and research communities should build atop non-proprietary tools and commit to services that are...."

[choldgraf]

love this language - how else can we incorporate ideas like this into our docs?

[choldgraf]

Hey all - thanks for these great comments! I've taken another pass at the text and (I believe) addressed the major and minor comments above. Please feel free to provide more thoughts to improve this, I think it is much better than v1!

[damianavila]

I think it is much better than v1!

I still need to re-read it as a whole thing, but I like the updates you have introduced!

[choldgraf]

I've added some short extra notes on user storage, because I realized that this was missing from the pricing estimation information. The storage stuff (like everything else) is not very precise and just meant to help people estimate costs.

Is there anything else I should tackle here?

[choldgraf]

I'll merge this in a day or two if there are no objections or suggested edits.

[damianavila]

I left one last comment. After that one is addressed, this LGTM to merge.
This is great stuff, @choldgraf. I am pretty sure others will appreciate the transparency and all the useful data you are shipping here!

[choldgraf]

Thanks for all the iteration here everybody, I think this is a lot of great new content, looking forward to continuing to iterate on this! :-)