Goals and strategy#
The challenge#
Communities in research and education face a difficult choice: proprietary services with lock-in risks and accessibility barriers, or managing their own infrastructure and being distracted from their mission. They lack efficient ways to collaborate, share knowledge, and contribute to open source. This creates silos and duplication of effort.
Our goal#
Build a shared platform and service that enables communities to co-create impact through collaborative data science and computing.
Do so in a way that is impactful (benefiting the entire ecosystem), accessible (serving diverse communities), and reliable (sustainable for everyone).
Our theory for impact#
A shared cloud service team with a commitment to open infrastructure and open science will give communities more reliable and impactful access to key data science workflows, without the downside of proprietary technology. They’ll achieve an outcome similar to hiring an in-house engineer, at a fraction of the cost and risk.
With a deep understanding of open source communities and workflows, we can develop technology more efficiently and sustainably.
With a deep understanding of research and education communities, we can identify shared needs and make better decisions for what to build.
By cultivating a network of communities, we can facilitate the spread of value across communities and increase the value of the service.
By serving this network with a shared infrastructure platform that gives communities autonomy and control, we can efficiently operate and enhance technology across the network without sacrificing their agency.
By enabling co-creation with interactive data and computing, we focus on a core workflow that helps communities collaborate internally, learn from each other, and accomplish their goals more efficiently.
With a membership model across a network of diverse communities, we can build recurring revenue streams that sustain and scale our team’s impact without dependence on any single contract.
Our priorities#
Build a shared and standardized technology platform and service.
Use the same 80% of technical building blocks across all communities, with customization functionality and guidance for communities to self-serve their own 20%.
Deliver excellent service with reliable operations, responsive support, and strong customer success.
De-risk the most common community concerns with shared infrastructure and the cloud.
Focus on the core data science workflow (learn → create → share), and encourage external specialized tools and services where possible.
Grow reliable and recurring revenue streams via a network of paying communities in research and education.
Drive our revenue with standard recurring services rather than one-off projects.
Drive revenue with community buyers that have low year-to-year variability in budget (e.g., an institution rather than a single research group).
Focus on products that make recurring service more valuable for a paying community.
Facilitate co-creation within, between, and alongside communities.
Within communities: Provide shared data, computing, and tools that enable members to co-create discoveries through interactive workflows.
Between communities: Identify shared needs, coordinate co-funding, and deploy enhancements network-wide to create shared value more efficiently than any community could achieve alone.
With open source: Deploy improvements that benefit all communities while strengthening the open source tools we depend on.
Do it in a healthy and sustainable way with open communities.
Take an upstream-first approach: contribute to open source whenever possible, build internal tooling only when truly 2i2c-specific or when no upstream alternative exists.
Make both directed contributions (improving our service via upstream) and foundational contributions (improving the overall health of upstream communities).
Be a standard-bearer for an “open organization”: lean into reproducibility, transparency, and inviting others to participate in our work.
Communicate our impact and share credit across our community network and the open source ecosystem.
Putting strategy into practice#
This strategy should guide everyone’s actions and decisions. Here are a few ways we can translate this strategy into impact:
Defining quarterly objectives. Quarterly objectives should represent significant progress towards our strategic priorities. This is our primary mechanism for ensuring our day-to-day work is aligned with our strategy. See Quarterly objectives.
Guiding our roadmaps. Our platform and service roadmaps should lean into the value proposition and strategic priorities. When we decide what to work on next, we should ask ourselves how the work will contribute to these priorities. See Scope and responsibilities.
Informing our decisions. Every team member should feel empowered to use this strategy as a guide for their own decision-making. When faced with a choice, consider which option best aligns with our goal, our theory for impact, and our priorities.
Communicating our work. This strategy gives us a shared language for talking about our work with each other and with the broader community. When we communicate about our work, we should connect it back to the “why” outlined in this strategy. See Marketing goals and strategy.