This page contains information about the 2i2c organization and community.
Your best place to learn about 2i2c's values is to check out the About pages on the 2i2c website. Those give an idea for the kind of organization that 2i2c strives to be, and the impact that it wishes to have on the world.
Check out for more information about this.
2i2c team members are distributed across the globe and 2i2c claims no formal physical center. All of its work is done online.
You can find more information about 2i2c's current team in the About page of its website.
We are a fiscally-sponsored project of {term}Code for Science and Society, a US 501(c)(3) public charity.
It was originally founded as a project of the {term}International Computer Science Institute.
2i2c does several kinds of things:
- Manage Infrastructure as a Service for research and education, using 100% open source infrastructure, and that respect a customer's right to replicate. Currently, this is done via Managed JupyterHub Distributions.
- Develop and maintain open infrastructure and open-source tools that underlie these services.
- Provide technical collaboration with researchers and educators on focused projects.
- Provide guidance and strategic assistance to organizations trying to navigate their decisions around cloud and open-source infrastructure.
- Provide OS community and project support for the major open source projects that align with our mission and values.
If 2i2c is effectively creating a business unit, so a reasonable question to ask is: why not start a company instead? We thought a lot about this, and ultimately came down to a few reasons:
- There's no reason that non-profits can't generate revenue, as long as they do so in accordance with their mission.
- We want to design 2i2c beyond its initial founding team. This means adding organizational (and legal!) constraints that ensure it aligns with its founding values.
- We believe a non-profit is best-positioned to advocate for open source ecosystems as a relatively neutral third party.
- We believe that being a non-profit makes a strong statement about our commitment to our mission and values, and that this will make us a more attractive partner to research and education.
We wish to create a virtuous cycle between research and education. It goes something like this:
Research and education organizations need help with dev-ops, deployments, customizations, and navigating the cloud landscape. They want to use and support open soruce tools, but need assistance in accomplishing this.
Open source communities need support from organizations that are using their tools. Most organizations use these tools without contributing back substantially. For these communities to survive, we need more organizations committed to contributing back.
This leads to the virtuous cycle:
2i2c wishes to support research and education by providing managed services and development that use open source tools. This will generate resources, that it then funnels back into open source support for both communities and tools that underlie the infrastructure it creates. This will lead to better tools, which makes this stack more attractive for research and education, thus increasing demand for managed services and development.
These are the open source communities that we are particularly invested in. As a general rule, we want most of our infrastructure improvements to happen via upstream contributions in these communities. Moreover, we encourage our engineers to spend part of their time doing broader community work (reviews, triage, community support, leadership) in these communities.
:::{note} This will be an ever-changing list as this ecosystem evolves! :::
In addition, we will likely interface heavily with projects in the broader PyData ecosystem (e.g., xarray or holoviz).