2i2c’s qualifications#

2i2c is a mission-driven non-profit with expertise in cloud infrastructure, Jupyter, open science and scholarship, and open development practices.

2i2c provides a managed, customized JupyterHub service that is tailored for research and education communities. We manage entirely non-proprietary, open-source tools that ensure user communities have the Right to Replicate this infrastructure with or without 2i2c. As a part of this service, 2i2c also makes upstream contributions to open-source communities as a part of continuously operating and improving this infrastructure.

This page describes why we believe that 2i2c and its service model is uniquely suited for the research and education communities.

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The content on this page can be re-used as a part of “uniqueness and sole source justification” forms when completing contracting for communities.

2i2c has expertise in managed cloud infrastructure in research and education#

Our team has developed and managed cloud infrastructure for over 5 years - first at our previous institutions and now as a part of 2i2c. We follow modern practices for Site Reliability Engineering with cloud infrastructure like Kubernetes and JupyterHub. This makes 2i2c uniquely capable of managing scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure for interactive computing.

Here are a few of the major projects our team memebers have been involved in over the past few years.

  • The Pangeo project - A community platform for Big Data geoscience connecting researchers across the world to large-scale computing and data infrastructure.

  • The UC Berkeley DataHubs - A collection of university-wide JupyterHubs for education serving many thousands of students.

  • The Binder Project - a large public cloud service for reproducible computing environments using JupyterHub, serving nearly 150,000 sessions each week.

  • The Syzygy Project - A network of federated JupyterHubs for more than 15 Canadian Universities running on national infrastructure.

  • The Jupyter Book and MyST Markdown projects - A collection of tools and standards for improving scientific and technical communication and authoring with interactive computing.

2i2c has expertise in open source workflows and Jupyter#

2i2c’s team is comprised of several “Distinguished Contributors” in the Jupyter ecosystem, which is a crucial technical component of this service. We are core team members of JupyterHub and Binder, and make regular contributions across the Jupyter ecosystem. Moreover, our team has many years of experience with all aspects of the Jupyter stack and we are comfortable interacting with open source communities everywhere. This makes 2i2c uniquely capable of both utilizing and improving this technology through upstream contributions.

2i2c has expertise with research and education workflows#

2i2c has years of experience managing cloud resources specifically for research and education communities. We have led and contributed to projects like the Binder Project, the Pangeo Project, the Syzygy Project, the UC Berkeley DataHubs, and the Jupyter Book project to serve thousands of users in the research and education community. As a non-profit, we have defined our mission in order to serve research and education sector, and our team and governing body is made up of individuals from this community. We strive to build an understanding of their needs, to represent their interests in the Jupyter and open source ecosystem, and to collaborate with them in our operations and development. 2i2c is uniquely positioned to serve as a collaborator for research and education via these efforts.

2i2c is a transparent, collaborative non-profit#

2i2c is a mission-driven non-profit organization that has a commitment to doing its work openly, transparently, and inclusively. Our mission is to provide researchers and educators with the infrastructure they need to do their work, and to support open source communities that underlie this infrastructure. 2i2c is governed by a Steering Council made of members from the research and education community. 2i2c manages all of our work in public spaces, including all of our infrastructure as well as all of our organizational strategy and practices.

The bottom line#

In short, there is no other organization in existence with a focus on open source workflows with Jupyter, extensive expertise in cloud infrastructure and JupyterHub, a commitment to managing non-proprietary and vendor-agnostic tools, a core practice of making upstream contributions to community-run infrastructure, and a non-profit and mission-driven structure.