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# System prepended metadata

title: Pangeo Community Support Brainstorm

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# Pangeo Community Support Brainstorm

Video: zoom.2i2c.org (p: `interact`)

## Ideas for agenda/discussion

- [Product Management vs. Community Management](https://github.com/2i2c-org/team-compass/issues/446)?
- [Rethinking community representative role](https://github.com/2i2c-org/docs/issues/134)
- [Managed service vs. collaborative service](https://github.com/2i2c-org/infrastructure/issues/1473)


## Questions to answer

- High-level questions we need to answer?
- More specific things to try in the short term?

## Background

- tl;dr: Pangeo had some enthusiastic leaders that bit off more than they could chew organizationally.
- 2018
  - Intense experimentation and high productivity
  - Put data in the cloud, created a bunch of hubs
  - The catch: way easier to prototype and stand up once than to run an ongoing service.
  - Free access to JupyterHubs and host all of the climate data in the cloud is a huge undertaking given their resources.
- What to do now?
  - Keep that enthusiasm and excitement
  - But move in the direction of feasability
  - And without alienating existing users

### Current Pangeo approach

- Work with partners for various pieces
  - Data hosting
    - Google Cloud, AWS
  - Computing instances
    - Microsoft (Planetary Computer)
- Get funding / grants to resource these partnerships
- Grants
  - Moore Foundation - Climate Data Science Lab
  - M2LInES - Schmidt Futures
  - Earthcube - Pangeo Forge
  - LEAP - NSF STC 
  - Each grant says "We'll have a cloud based jupyterhub"
    - Plan is to ship these deliverables/resources over to 2i2c
- Challenge
  - Each of these grants have separate sub-communities
  - They have their own funding source, their own stakeholders, etc.

### 2i2c and Pangeo now

- We've deployed the hubs for Pangeo / M2Lines / LEAP separately
- What we need: user support
  - Need more direct support for users on how to use the hub
  - Training and one-on-one conversations on how to use the infrastructure
- Challenges to growing this within the community
  - People always leaving: Continuity and institutional knowledge
    - How to grow connections across 2i2c's communities of practice
  - Grants are finite in time
    - "Communities" don't have money to spend
    - Funded projects and institutions have money
    - HPC-style centers have central funding that is often used to pay vendors

### What are the most important "services" the Pangeo leaders provided their community?

- Infrastructure for Open Science
- Make the infrastructure as generic as possible so it's franchiseable and trivial to bring on any new community of people.
  - Be able to support a small team with $10k, and a huge team with $1m
- GitLab vs. GitHub
  - GitLab - set it up on your own, but you lose cross-repository connections
  - GitHub - mono-service
- Federated JupyterHubs?
  - How do you build infrastructure that creates bonds between the hubs
- Problem with passive communities
  - We need to engage them with more leadership

### First 6 month iteration

- Curate web-based curricula that are already out there.
  - Videos tutorials notebooks etc
  - Come up with a process for others to use that material in a structured way.
- Monthly fireside chat slots etc
  - Ongoing workshops and tutorials etc
- Mechanisms for user interaction and Q/A
  - Right now all requests go to Ryan, not to 2i2c
  - Not scalable/sustainable for Ryan
  - "What we have now is money not a person"
  - How to recreate and scale a help desk
    - Could you promote people from within communities?

### What Pangeo sub-communities want

- Do they want a bleeding edge environment?
- Kitchen-sink-style hub with the bleeding edge of packages?
