New Fellowship Direction

[sgibson91]

Summary

Following the extension of the Fellowship period until December 2022 and being granted the CZI DEI EOSS grant, I'm going to pursue a new direction in order to satisfy both grants with a unified strategy.

Initial discussion here: https://github.com/2i2c-org/meta/issues/250 (private repo, sorry! I have copy-pasted the highlights below)

New Plan

...becoming a developer and contributing would help the Binder project grow in the most sustainable way, but that's also a really high bar in a project that is as mature and complex as Binder. I think a real sweet-spot would be the "provide focused feedback" area and maybe have Developer Advocates for those communities so that we can begin to close the gap between "this is current best practice in Julia/R" and the (Python heavy) Binder team figuring out that implementation. -- @sgibson91

Rather than running a single mega-workshop as originally proposed in #8, we can run some focused mini-workshops/conversations around particular topics.

Suggested plan:

1. Design a survey about how people outside of Python use Binder
2. Use that survey to figure out some major areas to understand better (pain points, where best-practices mismatches with Binder, etc)
3. Also invite respondents to provide contact information for follow up meetings
4. Brainstorm some focused meetings with subsets of respondents to generate more information from them, and to give them an opportunity to participate in conversations with folks on the Binder team
5. The outcome of this would hopefully be both more useful feedback from specific communities, and a "stronger connection" with a few active folks from those communities

-- @choldgraf

Implementation Notes

• Can use processes from https://github.com/sgibson91/open-practices-toolkit/projects/1 for collecting, storing, analysing and disseminating data/results
• @rainsworth can connect @sgibson91 with folks in the SSI to provide guidance and resources on survey design

Timeline

Current plan is to kick this off in the new year

2022	Task
Q1	Survey design
Q2	Collect data from the survey
Q3	Analyse survey results and host workshops/discussions
Q4	Combine results and disseminate

[sgibson91]

May be of use https://cefriel.github.io/survey-ontology/

[sgibson91]

A sentiment I wanted to capture from today's Hubs meeting

The ethos of repo2docker is to automate existing community best practices. If a community isn't doing something in the way we think they are, we shouldn't implement what we think.

This Fellowship so be about strengthening the bond between the repo2docker/binder teams so we can keep our finger on the pulse of community best practices without falling (too far) behind.