Update our organizational mission

[choldgraf]

Context

We've defined our organizational mission in this Google Doc. Here is the language that we used:

2i2c’s mission is to advance research and education by providing services, support, and development for open source tools in interactive computing and data science.

We've also since listed some mission/values information listed in the Our Values and Principles section of the About page (in fact our team compass points to this page).

Here is the language we use there:

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

Finally in a recent brainstorm for SciPy, @yuvipanda and I came up with a slightly refined version of the above:

2i2c makes interactive computing more impactful through community-centered open infrastructure services

Many of these were defined in the early days of 2i2c, and we now have a larger team than before, and our thinking about our mission has sharpened over time. As we are taking stock of our mission, strategy, and organizational structure, let's use this as an opportunity to refine our mission[^1].

[^1]: There are many ways to define a mission statement, here's one useful article. There's no one right way to do it, but I like the following criteria: (1) short, (2) simple, (3) evokes specific actions or intentions, (4) Makes clear what you do and don't do.

Proposal

We should reflect on the mission that we have listed, with the goal of proposing any modifications that we'd like to make. Ultimately, we should have a mission statement that has the following qualities.

• Is explicit, and defined in our Team Compass rather than in 2i2c.org/about
• Is something we all agree is a mission we can get behind

- [x] Chris puts together early draft of slides
- [ ] Rounds of feedback on [the org and strategy proposal slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MKl1eMAix2qL5XsuBsagb6H52_CtJXlGLXZnICvdtSY/edit?usp=sharing)
- [ ] No objections
- [ ] Formalize in team compass

[choldgraf]

There are a few relevant suggestions from that Google Doc as well:

From @colliand: All of us have talked about a forthcoming “transformation in education and research”. I hope that’s captured into the mission statement.

From @clcarson: Might there be reason to mention data explicitly in relation to interactive computing? There's a movement inside higher ed to build data infrastructures. That's not 2i2c's mission, but 2i2c's interactive workflows would want to interact with them, even if it may not be the dominant element.

And in general, there was agreement that we wanted to ensure that 2i2c focuses its efforts on "fluid interaction" with data, and infrastructure services that facilitate this kind of interaction. We don't want to get into the business of things like data warehouses, but if we can focus on infrastructure that facilitates the use of databases etc, perhaps that is in scope.

[colliand]

The discussion in Paris and captured in https://github.com/2i2c-org/meta/issues/583 highlighted orthogonal dimensions in 2i2c's mission: breadth and depth. I found this useful and suggest we find ways to incorporate that language into an improvement of 2i2c's current mission statement:

To make research and education more impactful, accessible, and delightful by developing, operating, and supporting infrastructure for interactive computing.

The breadth X depth phrasing from @choldgraf in the retreat summary and our discussions about build-measure-learn loops led me to think of this objective function: $$G=\sum_{Communities}Breadth \cdot Depth$$

2i2c advances our mission objective when we grow the goodness function $G$ by

1. expanding the number of communities we serve
2. expanding the breadth within a community
3. expanding the depth within a community
4. expanding the interaction between communities
5. contributing to the upstream open source ecosystem

@colliand added 4 and 5 based on comments from @damianavila and @consideRatio below.

2i2c enables more (breadth) people to participate in data+compute-intensive (depth) science/scholarship/policy.

Imagine that breadth is measured horizontally and depth is measure vertically. Our service to the University of Toronto is short in depth and wide in breadth, like a pancake. Toronto's depth grew over time with conflicting demands between R and Python user audiences. Our service to LEAP is narrow on breadth and tall on depth, like a fir tree.

[damianavila]

Love the concept, let me go further...

How we can conceptually capture the interaction between the different communities so that the fourth expanding item is something like:

4. expanding the interaction between the communities.

I will defer the formulation of the function to the real mathematician 😉

[consideRatio]

I appreciate having a function like that defined! I also appreciate @damianavila idea to have it capture community-to-community interactions as well!

Accumulated goodness over time

Another thing I'd like to capture somehow is the concept of an accumulated goodness over time - let's call it total goodness for now. Something like the function below, but perhaps weighted to focus on total goodness a few years or decates into the future.

$$ T = \int_{0}^{\infty} G(t) \cdot dt $$

I think with terminology like this introduced, we can discuss strategy on how to optimize G over time more clearly.

One of the most impactful talks for me in my life (15min, key point between 3m48s and 7m40s) related to this exactly but in the context of decarbonization. I came to realize that by focusing on short term reductions of emissions, we could hamper our ability to get to and below net-zero emissions or at least make us get there slower.

Goodness from open-source ecosystem improvement

I'm super happy about knowing that improvements to open-source software we contribute to improve things for all kinds of people across the world.

This is perhaps captured directly already by the drafted mission statement, which currently includes:

[...] and development for open source tools in interactive computing and data science.

[choldgraf]

Draft of a mission / org strategy for review

I've put together a re-statement of our organizational rationale / mission / major strategy / current status / major opportunities to improve. It is a draft meant for feedback, edits, guidance, etc from the team, and includes a prompt at the beginning with some ideas of where/how to give feedback.

The strategic mission / plan is defined in these slides

Consider this a "proposal" for our stated organizational mission that we can use to guide our priorities and goal-setting efforts. I am happy to make adjustments per feedback, and within a week or two I'd like to arrive at a version that we all consider "safe to try" and encode it in our team compass.

I'll set aside an hour Wednesday at 2pm CET, and Thursday at 5pm CET as an "open office hours" to discuss any of this if people would like to do so. I've put both in our team calendar, and I'll be available in the 2i2c zoom room and am happy to go over language, discuss questions or implications, etc.

[choldgraf]

Thanks for feedback and plans for next steps

I've gotten a lot of great feedback about the slides that we've been using to define our organizational mission, vision, strategy, etc. I need to digest a bit and make some more adjustments, and also want to give time for folks to provide feedback who haven't been able to attend meetings.

I also want us to focus on thinking about the goal(s) we should prioritize for Q3 of this year, and it's unlikely that we'll finish this strategy document before we need to start that process, so here is my plan:

• Please provide feedback by EOD Monday the 12th. I'll define two more working sessions that day in case folks would like to join and provide feedback in-person. I'll hold off on making major changes until this day.
• At the end of next week I'll consider us at a "checkpoint" for this document. If we have converged on some of the higher-level things, then I will encode those in the team compass. My target will be to define an organizational mission, vision, and values and leave the strategy for future iterations.
• I'll then divert my attention to engaging in a goals setting process for Q3. Please begin to focus your efforts in this direction as well. It's more important that we define thoughtful goals to drive our efforts forward in the next quarter.
• I'll restart refining the rest of the strategy documents in Q3, and will ask for more feedback then.