---
tags: turing-way
---
# Turing hosted proposal for Jupyter Community Workshop, Jan-Aug 2020

***Help needed!***

Issue for discussion: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/issues/770

## Actions

- [ ] Add your name and details to the planning issue: [#770](https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/issues/770)
* This is going to be a last-minute submission, so please make sure that the planning issue has key information about who you are and why it would be good for you to attend the event before Sunday!
- [ ] Add any comments/suggestions you have in the boxes below. Evidence of contributions would be super useful :smile:

## Application

*All suggested answers are very welcome*

### Your Name and Affiliation

* Kirstie Whitaker
Turing research fellow, Alan Turing Institute, London, UK
* Tania Allard
Senior Developer Advocate, Microsoft UK, Manchester, UK

### Brief title for your event

Building capacity for diverse and sustainable Jupyter contributions within the UK

### Describe the goal/topic of the event

Our goal is to build connections between current Jovyans in the UK and develop a roadmap to broaden participation across the Jupyter ecosystem.
We will run a two day workshop for 25 existing contributors to Project Jupyter and a one day mentored contribution sprint for around 30 new contributors from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds.

Although we will not be able to answer them, we hope to stimulate converations around:

* What is a contribution to Jupyter?
* What does a Jupyter contributor look like?
* How do we meet each other and how can we mentor our colleagues to share their knowledge effectively?
* How do we fund these activities and maintain healthy workloads within the ecosystem?

The event will be co-hosted by the Alan Turing Institute and Microsoft UK.
The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
It provides a hub between researchers, instructors, librarians and policy makers in UK universities, industry partners such as Accenture, HSBC, Siemens and Lloyds Register Foundation, and government agencies including the the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defense, and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
The Institute seeks to bring cutting edge research methods, tools, practices and systems to address real-world problems.
It can only achieve this mission by sharing knowledge and expertise across its diverse community of stakeholders: an indentical challenge to the long term sustainability of the Jupyter ecosystem.

<!-- *Need a sentence about Microsoft?* I do not think so -->

We have three specific goals for this event:

1. Form a UK Jupyter contributors community to facilitate sustained contributions to the whole of the Jupyter ecosystem.
2. Map and identify the most common barriers limiting participation and onboarding to Jupyter projects, and develop a roadmap of processes and improvements to help lower said barriers.
3. Run a "Jupyter mentored sprints for diverse beginners" to support members of traditionally underrepresented groups who are interested in contributing to Jupyter but have encountered barriers to participation in the past.

These three goals complement each other and, at the same time, cover several cycles of research, strategic planning and active contribution to the Jupyter ecosystem.

---

*KW: I don't think we need these paragraphs - but lets discuss*

The project Jupyter and its vast ecosystem have revolutionised how the world conducts collaborative science, data science, data-driven journalism, and scientific communication and outreach.
Jupyter users, advocates and community members are spread all over the world and cover an immensely broad range of disciplines, use cases and standard practices.

The sustainability of the Jupyter ecosystem as a whole is therefore critical with a comprehensive adoption and use of the multiple open tools that form the Jupyter ecosystem.
Therefore, one of the primary goals of the Jupyter governance body is to ensure the sustainability of the ecosystem. Not only in terms of open tools and infrastructure development but also processes and mechanisms to better support, onboard, diversify, compensate, and increase the number of Jupyter contributors globally.
As an open source community with widespread impact, it is critical to ensure that said processes and mechanisms are accessible to all. And that, at the same time that they recognise and protect the participation of the most marginalised groups in the open-source ecosystem.

---

### How does the workshop involve strategic work related to the central open-standards, protocols, abstractions and architecture, and open-source subprojects of Project Jupyter?

Sustainability is a significant challenge faced by open-source projects and communities.
Having transparent and robust processes and mechanisms for community onboarding and participation is critical to ensure the long-term sustainability and adoption of Project Jupyter products and services.
Our goal is to support current community leaders, maintainers and core developers by reviewing and enhancing existing mechanisms to improve community participation.

Improving the bus-factor of projects in the Jupyter ecosystem is a high strategic priority for a community that has achieved so much in such a short period of time.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the greatest ways to support the mental health of current contributors and maintainers is to ensure they are replaceable, that they can leave at any time.
Two mechanisms to maintain healthy workloads for volunteer community members are 1) improve pathways through which new folks are empowered to join and lead Jupyter teams, and 2) broaden the definition of a contribution to include all the activities covering maintenance and growth of an open source project: documentation, advocacy and marketing, policy and governance, and user experience research expertise.

Improving governance and interoperability across the various projects within the Jupyter ecosystem is an important strategic goal that requires specific business management and communications expertise.
Professionals with these skills often do not see themselves represented in open source community leaders - where technical expertise tends to dominate - and therefore self-select out of the potential contributor pool.
As with the Google Summer of Code expanding to include the Google Season of Docs, it is necessary for Project Jupyter to specifically recruit expertise in community and project management.
The effect on more effective communication within Project Jupyter will be enhanced if the new contributors themselves represent a diverse community.

Supporting and empowering members of the most underrepresented and marginalised groups is not only a moral imperative but crucial to building a genuinely diverse and inclusive community.
Implementations developed by people from multiple perspectives and lived experiences is one of the most effective ways to dismantle barriers to participation and adoption.
As an open source project developing open tools and infrastructure for the global community, having specific outreach and mentorship programmes in place to achieve this goal is a crucial part of Jupyter's mission.

### "How will the workshop lead to the growth and sustainability of the Jupyter community? How will it grow the size and health of the core Jupyter project contributor community? Of the broader Jupyter ecosystem of which Jupyter is a part?"

This workshop will nurture the Jupyter community in at least four ways:

1. A local UK contributor community will foster further contributions, such as technical development, advocacy, institutional adoption, and funding, to support the Jupyter mission.
Focusing on a regional community will facilitate continuous in-person interactions among community contributors, and coordinated funding applications and advocacy mechanisms.
2. Participants who have contributed in very different ways across the Jupyter ecosystem will share similarities and differences of their experiences.
We will feedback these observations to the Jupyter Governance team and support initiatives to harmonise and improve the contributing experience across sub-projects for new contributors and existing maintainers alike.
3. We will grow the contributor community by identifying participation barriers and mechanisms to lower or eliminate challenges that new contributors face when choosing to contribute to Jupyter.
We will focus on improving the recruitment and onboarding experience for new contributors from across academia, industry, and government.
4. The mentored sprint, specifically designed to support a diverse group of new contributors, will build a supportive network who can provide peer support, advocacy to other members of underrepresented groups, and feedback to the Jupyter community on how to best grow a health and inclusive community.

### "What types of people would attend the event and why does their participation align with the goals of Jupyter Workshops in general and your particular goals for this workshop?"

The two day workshop will consist of current Jupyter contributors, users and advocates to the Jupyter ecosystem.
This includes researchers, research software engineers, decision-makers, journal publishers and editors, librarians, and educators who have committed to sharing their expertise at the workshop if this proposal is funded.
Participants who have helped to design and build this application include (in alphabetical order):

* Tania Allard: Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft UK and Fellow for the Python Software Foundation, organiser of mentored sprints for diverse beginners since 2017.
* Evelina Gabasova: Priniciple Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute and Microsoft "Most Valuable Profssional" in Developer Technologies since 2016.
* Sarah Gibson: Research Software Engineer at The Alan Turing Institute and operator for Project Binder and mybinder.org.
* Tony Hirst: Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications at The Open University and editor of the Tracking Jupyter newsletter
* Iain Hrynaszkiewicz: Publisher in Open Research at PLOS interested in incorporating open infrastructure into academic publishing.
* Ian Hawke: Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton with five years experience teaching (live coding and previously created) with jupyter notebooks Teaching (live coding and prepping teaching materials).
* Martin O'Reilly: Director of Research Engineering at The Alan Turing Institute and lead investigator for data safe havens in the cloud which facilitates secure data science using open infrastructure.
* Tomas Petricek: Lecturer in the School of Computing and lead developer of Wrattler, an extensible, reproducible and polyglot notebook which can be accessed as an extension for JupyterLab.
* Ian Stuart and Bert Robberechts: Software Engineers at EDINA, the centre for digital expertise and online service delivery at the University of Edinburgh, JupyterHub service providers, contributors nbgrader, and experts in accessibility work for Jupyter notebooks.
* Kirstie Whitaker: research fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and lead developer of The Turing Way, a series of Jupyter Books detailing open and inclusive data science practices.

We have designed the two day workshop to support 25 participants (10 from London, 15 from around the UK).
If this application is funded we will recruit experienced Jupyter contributors across the UK to ensure the conversation is representative of as diverse and representative a community as possible.

**These participants support our goal of building connections of existing Jupyter community members within the UK to facilitate and grow contributions in the future.**

At least eight of the workshop participants will be asked to stay to support between 25 and 30 new contributors at the mentored sprint.
These people will likely be members of other open source communities who are passionate about Project Jupyter but have never contributed, or team members in STEM fields who have relavent expertise but who have never contributed to open source projects.
We will select these participants through an open and transparent application process that will prioritise participation of black and indiginous people of colour (BIPOC), LGBTQ+ people, disabled and neurodivergent people, people from low socioeconomic status groups, and people with non-technical expertise (such as marketing, advocacy, documentation, communication and project management).

**These participants support our goal of bringing in new contributors to the Jupyter community and removing barriers to their participation through specific mentored support.**

<!-- Shall we add more details here? Any other groups I missed? ❓❓ -->

### How does the event reach users/contributors that are underserved or underrepresented in our community?

We will reach out to those already contributing to the Jupyter ecosystem within the UK and proactively invite those that are from underrepresented groups.
The organisers have extensive connections within the Turing Institute's network of 13 partner universities and industry and government partners, the UK Software Sustainability Institute, Microsoft's UK network, the PyCon UK community, the British Library's network, and multiple other open source and data library communities.
We will also promote the event through the Tracking Jupyter and Turing Way newsletters.

By organising a mentored sprint for diverse beginners we will onboard, mentor and include those from an under-represented background that have encountered participation barriers in the past.
We will invite and approach user groups serving underrepresented groups to attend the sprint as well as to share the event with their members.
Groups we will promote to include: AI gender minority, One Health Tech, Queer in tech, ResearcHers Code, Trans Who Code, Black Women Code, Women in Data Science, Women Who Code, the UK Pyladies chapter and the UK Rladies chapters.
We will continue to grow this list during the application period, and make sure that the application timeline is sufficient to include people who need more time to plan travel or work on weekend days.

We understand that planning a work event on a Saturday excludes many potential contributors.
However, organising events on week days also excludes people who do not have institutional support to volunteer their time to Project Jupyter.
The budget we have provided assumes the maximum travel and hotel costs for workshop participants, along with travel funds for ten of the workshop participants.
(We assume that many of the participants will be travelling from within London to the event).
We will use the excess funds to provide childcare and additional support for mentored sprint participants.

### Approximate event dates (no later than August 2020)

The event will run from Thursday to Saturday, with travel to London arranged for Wednesday (accomodation provided that evening) and return travel on either Friday evening (workshop participants) or Saturday evening (worshop participants who also volunteer to mentor contributions).

There is room availability at the Alan Turing Institute on the following dates, and if this application is successful we will poll participants on which dates will support the most diverse range of contributors.

* 21 & 22 May <---- This is actually the best time by quite a long way

A proposed schedule is provided below:

| Location | Day | Time | Activity |
| -------- | --- | ---- | -------- |
| Alan Turing Institute | Thursday 21 May | 9:00 | Coffee and check in |
| | | 9:20 | Welcome, code of conduct and housekeeping |
| | | 9:30 | Introduction lightning talks, 3 minute presentations from all participants including contributions they have made to Jupyter (n = 25) |
| | | 11:00 | Biobreak :coffee: |
| | | 11:30 | Facilitated post-it session to collect challenges and barriers that participants have faced in contributing to Jupyter. These will be clustered as they are shared to derive common themes across the workshop participants. |
| | | 12:30 | Lunch :yum: |
| | | 14:00 | Small group working to brainstorm actions to address barriers |
| | | 15:30 | Biobreak :coffee: |
| | | 16:00 | Report out from groups on actions they recommend to facilitate contributions |
| | | 17:00 | Open discussion to make plan for contribution activities the following day |
| | | 17:30 | Close, free time |
| | | 19:30 | Dinner for all workshop participants |
| Alan Turing Institute | Friday 22 May | 9:00 | Coffee and check in |
| | | 09:20 | Welcome, remind participants of goals for the hack day |
| | | 09:30 | Small group contributions to documentation on how to contriute to Jupyter. Coffee available around 11:00. |
| | | 12:00 | Report out from groups on progress so far. Opportunity to connect and coordinate across groups. |
| | | 12:30 | Lunch :yum: |
| | | 14:00 | Small group contributions to documentation on how to contriute to Jupyter |
| | | 15:30 | Biobreak :coffee: |
| | | 16:00 | Report out from groups and open discussion on next steps for building UK network of contributions to Jupyter |
| | | 17:00 | Close |
| Microsoft Reactor | Saturday 23 May | 10:00 | Coffee and check in |
| | | 10:30 | Welcome, code of conduct and housekeeping |
| | | 10:45 | Presentation: What is a mentored sprint |
| | | 11:15 | Questions |
| | | 11:30 | Mentored contributions individually or in small groups |
| | | 12:30 | Lunch :yum: |
| | | 13:00 | Mentored contributions individually or in small groups |
| | | 14:30 | Report out from participants on the contributions they have made to Jupyter |
| | | 15:20 | Closing remarks and thank yous from organisers |
| | | 15:30 | (Optional) networking and hack time |
| | | 16:30 | Close |

I'm pretty easy. Maybe in the easter break to make it easier for folks who are teaching?
- [name=Tania Allard] - I am a bit concerned about Easter break re folks with family responsibilities. Might be worth suggesting 2-3 possible dates?

### Proposed venue

Alan Turing Institute in London (British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB)

### What is your proposed budget? Include a total amount you will not exceed and a high-level line-item breakdown of expense categories. Is there any other funding being provided from other sources?

*Added by Kirstie before she went out for dinner.*
*More details in the application coming tomorrow morning!*

| Item | Cost per item (GBP) | Number of items | Total (GBP) |
| ---- | ----:| ------:| -----:|
| Venue for workshop | *In kind support from Alan Turing Institute* | 1 | 0 |
| Breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks at Turing Institute | 40 | 25 x 2 | 2,000 |
| Dinner on 1st night | 50 | 25 | 1,250 |
| Return travel for workshop participants | 150 | 15 | 2,250 |
| Hotel accomodation for workshop participants | 130 | 15 x 2 | 3,900 |
| Venue for mentored sprint | *In kind support from Microsoft* | 1 | 0 |
| Hotel accomodation for mentored sprint mentors | 130 | 5 x 1 | 650 |
| Return travel support for mentored sprint participants | 50 | 10 | 500 |
| Lunch and coffee breaks at mentored sprint | 20 | 35 | 700
| | | **Grand total** | **11,250** |
| | | **converts to** | approx **14,990.61 USD** |

***Notes***

* Turing in kind venue
- [name=Tania Allard]: I am terrible at budgeting so please someone chip in!
- Lunches, coffee, and snacks: £3000
- UK travel expenses for out of town attendees:
- Accommodation for out of town attendees:
- Dinner/social event with attendees to the sprint:
- [name=Hugh Shanahan]: how many people can attend? then work on the per person costs. Pulling figures from the air per person...
- Lunches, coffee, and snacks: £20 per day
- UK travel expenses for out of town attendees: ~£150
- Accommodation for out of town attendees: £100 per night
- Dinner/social event with attendees to the sprint: £20-30
- I'm assuming Turing will cover room expenses??

### All events funded by Jupyter require the adoption and enforcement of our Code of Conduct. Do you agree to serve as our proxy to address any COC complaints that may arise at the event? *

Yes

### Is there any other information you'd like for us to consider?

*Optional*

Maybe add something about the Turing? Might have already been mentioned!

* [name=Sarah] Some ideas on wording for Turing institute/Turing Way. Please use/remix/ignore as you see fit :smile:
* The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. It provides a hub between its 13 partner universities through which knowledge and expertise can be shared, and as a bridge with its strategic partners to bring cutting edge research to real-world problems. Therefore, the Turing is uniquely placed to work as a base for a UK Jupyter community and reach a wealth of expertise from a range of domains. *Do the 13 institutes have any Athena Swan Gold or Silver awards??*
* _The Turing Way_ is a lightly-opinionated handbook for data science and a global community of contributors who share their knowledge from a range of perspectives and domains. _[Then maybe point out that the Turing Way is a Jupyter Book and we can use our existing community to foster collaboration with Jupyter. My brain can't quite get around the wording on a Saturday morning! :joy:]_

## Notes

*Here's a space for comments/questions/suggestions if you think they don't fit in one of the answers to the questions above just yet*

This event is UK focused in order to facilitate and coordiante contributions to Jupyter within a small(ish) geographic region in which participants are likely to request support from similar funding agencies.
However, the UK has just voted for a right-wing nationalist government that will expidite the UK leaving the European Union.
We - the organisers of this event - do not support any actions that make research and innovation harder, particularly for members of traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM fields.
We would like to use this space to reiterate our commitment to a European and global scientific community, and that we will continue to work to reduce barriers to participation for all.

* [name=Patricia Herterich] there are so many good points in the GitHub thread, I find it hard to distill into one workshop. Just to say that as part of the RDA work, there are some publishers who consider notebooks as part of their service - not sure if that's a special/new audience for the jupyter community

---

## Paragraph for NumFocus / Jupyter blog post announcement

*If you're happening upon this update, you've discovered the secret - we've been successful!*
*We've been asked not to share this publicly until the announcement next week, but YAY! Thank you for all your help writing the proposal!*

Event: **Building capacity for diverse and sustainable Jupyter contributions within the UK**

Organisers: **Kirstie Whitaker & Tania Allard**

The [Alan Turing Institute](https://www.turing.ac.uk) and [Microsoft UK](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/advocates/index.html) will convene Jovyans from across the UK for a two day workshop on 21 and 22 May 2020.
The meeting at the Turing's London office will mark the beginning of a coordinated Jupyter contributors community in the UK.
A diverse group of participants from academia, government and industry will map and identify the most common barriers to contributing to Jupyter projects, and develop a roadmap of processes and improvements to help lower said barriers.
They will discuss how to best facilitate sustained contributions across the whole of the Jupyter ecosystem.
On Saturday 23 May, the group will put their discussions into practice with a "Jupyter mentored sprints for diverse beginners" event at [Microsoft Reactor, London](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/reactor/Location/London).
Members of traditionally underrepresented groups who are interested in contributing to Jupyter but have encountered barriers to participation in the past are warmly invited to join experienced community members to learn how they can share their expertise to boost the health of Jupyter projects.

> If you would like to be notified when applications to attend the workshop or the mentored sprint are open, please join _The Turing Way_ mailing list: https://tinyletter.com/TuringWay.
> Applications will open in early March with a decision in early April.