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2i2c

Code for Science and Society
United States of America
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About

Launched: 2020
Record Updated: Oct 04, 2024
Authoring tool

2i2c designs, develops, and operates interactive computing environments that facilitate workflows for open science and education in the cloud. It builds its services on open infrastructure and enhances its service via upstream contributions and support. It runs the service as a collaboration with communities based on shared responsibility and with infrastructure that ensures a community's Right to Replicate the infrastructure without 2i2c.

Research Organization Registry (Opens in new window)

Mission

Our mission is to make research and education more impactful, accessible, and delightful by developing, operating, and supporting infrastructure for interactive computing.

Key Achievements


  1. In 2.5 years we've grown our service to around 4000 active weekly users across more than 50 communities served from both research and education. (https://2i2c.org/kpis/cloud/)
  2. We recover roughly 50% of our operational costs through ongoing service fees, with intention to refine and grow this service model to reach full sustainability on fees alone. (see https://2i2c.org/kpis/finances/#summary-of-cost-and-revenue for a work-in-progress dashboard on this)
  3. We are averaging around 15 merged PRs each week across the Jupyter ecosystem (https://2i2c.org/kpis/upstream/#merged-prs-authored-by-team-members).

Technical Attributes

Maintenance Status

Actively Maintained

Open Code Repository

Implemented
Website (Opens in new window)

Technical Documentation

Implemented
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Open Product Roadmap

In Progress

Technical Attribute Statements

Technology Readiness Level

  • Actual system proven in operational environment

Code Licenses Used

  • BSD licenses

Content Licensing

This page has our licensing policy: https://compass.2i2c.org/open-source/ip/#intellectual-property

Our Right to Replicate describes the principles we follow in how we choose to design the infrastructure and service model: https://2i2c.org/right-to-replicate/

Standards

Integrations

Cloud S3 storage
Kubernetes layers in major commercial cloud providers
GitHub

Community Engagement

Code of Conduct

Implemented
Website (Opens in new window)

Community Engagement

Implemented

Community Statements

More About Community Engagement

Community Engagement Activities:

There are a lot of different kinds of communities we might use to answer this, but here are some relevant pages for a few key types of communities.

Our key stakeholders page defines the types of communities we aim to serve: https://compass.2i2c.org/organization/mission/

Our shared responsibility model page describes the kinds of roles that exist in the service and how we aim to share them with communities: https://docs.2i2c.org/about/service/

Our Open Source Strategy section describes the approach we take towards engaging with and supporting OS communities: https://compass.2i2c.org/open-source/

All of these are continually evolving, but are a good first start. See also calendars and meetings: https://compass.2i2c.org/reference/calendar/

We take a lot of inspiration from the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, though we have not formally audited ourselves in comparison to those criteria. This is something we'd love to do, just haven't had time yet (and feel like an external org should do the auditing, not us).

Policies & Governance

Governance Summary

2i2c is governed by a Steering Council, and is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society, a US-based 501(c)3. Additional governance development is in progress.

Policies

Privacy Policy

Implemented
Website (Opens in new window)

Governance Records

In Progress

Governance Structure & Processes

In Progress
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Transparent Pricing and Cost Expectations

Implemented
Website (Opens in new window)

Policy Statements

Board Structure

  • Advisory board or steering committee

Community Governance

  • None

Additional Information

Organizational History

2i2c was created by its current Steering Council, who also act as its founding partners. This group roughly came from three projects that similarly operated cloud infrastructure for interactive computing:




  • The Berkeley DataHub is an institution-wide JupyterHub that was led in-part by Yuvi Panda, Chris Holdgraf, Cathryn Carson, and Fernando Perez.
  • The Syzygy project (https://syzygy.ca) is a network of JupyterHubs for Canadian universities that was led in-part by Jim Colliander.
  • The Pangeo project (https://pangeo.io) is a community platform for Big Data geoscience that is built on a JupyterHub and cloud computing, and is led in-part by Ryan Abernathey.


Each of these projects demonstrated considerable value for the communities it served, but it was also clear that this model was unsustainable for most other communities of practice due to difficulties in hiring for cloud engineering skills.

As a result, communities tended to use proprietary services that weren't aligned with the values many of us identified with (e.g., community-driven infrastructure, values-based organizations, non-profit structures, etc).

We created 2i2c in order to have a mission-driven and community-focused organization that could design and manage cloud infrastructure on behalf of communities of practice, but that framed the partnership as a collaboration based around shared responsibility and transparency rather than a pure "consumer / producer relationship". We also wanted to ensure that 2i2c would commit to making upstream contributions and support as part of its key mission, in order to avoid the extractive relationship many organizations have with open source.

Organizational Structure

Business or Ownership Model

Fiscal sponsorship (non-profit)

Current Affiliations

  • University of California at Berkeley (Fernando Perez, Cathryn Carson)
  • Columbia University and Earthmover (Ryan Abernathey)
  • University of British Columbia (Lindsey Heagy, Jim Colliander)

Funding

Primary Funding Source

  • Contributions

Funding Needs

2i2c aims to identify a self-sustaining cost recovery model with ongoing service fees for communities that it partners with in managing cloud infrastructure. We also pursue several other funding streams to advance our mission in open infrastructure for open science.

Below are a few areas where we are actively seeking funding.



  • Cloud and service costs for one or more communities that cannot afford the full price of a monthly service.
  • Development projects to enhance open source technology that is critical for open science and education.
  • Broader community and technical support for the key open source communities in which we participate.
  • Organizational service development funding runway to explore and refine our model for sustainably serving infrastructure.

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