Jupyter Blog - sustainability

Announcing our first Jupyter Community Funded Proposals

2025-11-04T19:19:00+00:00

We are thrilled to announce the results of our first round of Jupyter Community Funding proposals. This is the first funding call from the Jupyter Foundation to directly solicit proposals from the Jupyter community.

We received many outstanding ideas from community members. We are so grateful for the time and effort everyone put into their submissions. This is a new process for us, and we’ve already learned a lot. We’re excited to take this first step in directly supporting community-driven work.

After a careful review, we are happy to fund the following proposals:

More reliable visual testing for Jupyter frontends: This project will improve visual regression and integration testing across Jupyter frontends. We hope this will lower maintenance costs and reduce maintainer burnout by making testing more reliable.
Separating JupyterLab’s build system for easier maintenance: This work will finish separating JupyterLab’s build system into a standalone tool. This will make maintenance easier for both core developers and extension authors.
Improving keyboard accessibility in JupyterLab: This proposal will focus on making JupyterLab fully navigable via keyboard and testing with disabled users. The goal is to find and fix key accessibility blockers, making the tools more usable for everyone.
Growing the contributor community for JupyterHub and JupyterBook: This project will tackle efforts like team coordination and mentorship pipelines with clear entry points for contributions. We hope this will grow our contributor base by making it easier to attract, retain, and leverage community contributions.
Improving code quality with custom linting rules: This proposal will develop custom linting rules to enforce project-specific standards in the JupyterLab and Notebook codebases. This will help catch common issues early and improve the long-term health of the code.
Reviving the extension playground for easier prototyping: This project will revive and improve the extension playground, a tool for prototyping new extensions. We’re excited for this to lower the entry barrier for extension development and help the ecosystem grow.

A huge thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal and participated in the review. We also want to thank the authors of proposals that were not funded in this round. We particularly appreciate their effort and hope they will continue to engage with this process.

We’re excited to see these projects develop and support the dedicated people behind them. This is just the beginning, and we look forward to more community funding opportunities in the future.

We want to send a special thank-you to Savannah Ostrowski, former Jupyter Foundation board treasurer, for her work in setting up this initial round of funding.

CZI awards three EOSS grants to Jupyter community members

2021-10-14T20:30:00+00:00

The Jupyter community is pleased to announce that members of its community have received three awards from the CZI Essential Open Source Software grant series. This grant series has previously funded work in the Jupyter ecosystem such as real-time collaboration in JupyterLab and JupyterHub’s Contributor in Residence pilot. Read below for a brief overview of the recently-funded proposals!

CZI’s Essential Open Source Software for Science program supports software maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for critical open source tools.

Accessibility in Jupyter

One of the biggest challenges in building complex web-based applications is ensuring that they are accessible to a broad and diverse audience of users. Improving accessibility requires dedicated time and significant expertise in understanding the major challenges to overcome. Tania (@trallard), Isabela (@isabela-pf), and Tony (@tonyfast) were recently awarded an EOSS award to dedicate time and development towards making Jupyter tools more accessible. You can follow some of their work in the Accessibility repository and see the original text of this proposal here. This grant will be led by Tania, Isabela, and Tony (each at QuanSight Labs), and administered by the team at QuanSight Labs.

Interactive documentation

Because Jupyter is a dynamic and web-based interface, you can do a lot more with interactive documentation than is possible on traditional static websites. @carreau was awarded an EOSS grant to improve the state of interactive documentation within Jupyter. You can check out some of his early ideas in this blog post. This grant will be led by Matthias Bussonnier at QuanSight Labs, and administered by the team at QuanSight Labs.

Community strategic support for JupyterHub

The JupyterHub community built off of its Contributor in Residence pilot to propose a dedicated role for designing and developing community strategy for the JupyterHub sub-project. This role will spearhead efforts to ensure that there are inclusive and effective pathways into and throughout the JupyterHub community, with the goal of sharing best-practices with others in Jupyter and PyData ecosystems. You can follow along with this work in the JupyterHub Team Compass and find the original text of this proposal here. This effort will be led by Sarah Gibson(@sgibson91) and Chris Holdgraf (@choldgraf) (both at 2i2c), and Sarah will serve as our first community strategic lead. The grant will be administered by the team at NumFocus.

Congrats to the recipients of these awards, we’re excited to see what comes out of this work! And many thanks to all of the community members that helped write and refine these proposals.

The JupyterHub and Binder Contributor in Residence!

2019-11-26T19:52:00+00:00

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Project Jupyter are teaming up to pilot a new role in the Jupyter community: the JupyterHub Contributor in Residence

Thanks to funding from the CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science initiative we are welcoming Georgiana Elena as our first Contributor in Residence!

Managing a codebase that spans many repositories and sub-projects as well as operating mybinder.org is a significant effort. Over time we have identified a need for dedicated support to ensure that activity and communication within these repositories is efficient and productive. Driven by this need and inspired by the Django Fellowship model, we shaped the idea of a JupyterHub/Binder Contributor in Residence (CIR).

Thanks to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a Contributor in Residence within the community is now possible. Starting this year, CZI launched the Essential Open Source Software for Science grant program. It is aimed at helping open source communities that make up the core foundation of the scientific stack. We applaud CZI in providing support for core infrastructure across the sciences, and we’re honored to be part of CZI’s vision of funding maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for open-source projects.

In this post we’ll introduce the community to our first Contributor in Residence (Georgiana) and her mentor (Tim)! The rest of this post is in the form of a conversation between Georgiana and Tim. We hope you enjoy it and that it let’s you get to know the team a bit better.

Tim: Hello Georgiana. Congrats on becoming the inaugural CIR. We’ve been lucky to have you already as a contributor on JupyterHub especially your work adding support for using Traefik as a proxy.
Geo: Hey Tim! Thank you, it’s been a really amazing experience to work on JupyterHub. I’m really excited for this next year’s journey.
Tim: You are the very first Contributor in Residence. Can you explain a little what this means?
Geo: The CIR role is about helping make the little things around the projects be amazing. Little things like answering newly opened issues, guide people towards the right place for discussion, improve bits of documentation or code, helping with releases, give people the right tools to make great contributions. And I have a great team of existing contributors to work with.
Tim: That’s right! My role in all this is to be a mentor and guide. JupyterHub and Binder have a small team that does a good job looking after the main repositories, but the universe of JupyterHub and Binder repositories is huge. So sometimes things get overlooked or missed. For example Pull Requests or Issues in one of the less-popular repositories can go for a long time without getting attention. This may hold up progress somewhere else, and people have a bad experience contributing to the project.
Geo: Hopefully we can improve on this a bit so that more people have a great experience when contributing.

Tim: Let’s find out a bit more about you. What did you do before getting involved with JupyterHub?
Geo: I studied computer science in Bucharest spending the last semester developing my bachelor’s project as an Erasmus exchange student in Madrid. During summers I worked in the industry, doing a few internships abroad. I tried to gain as much practical experience as possible, to get in touch with different people and cultures, and interning seemed like the right move.
Tim: How did you get involved with JupyterHub?
Geo: I got involved with JupyterHub thanks to the amazing Outreachy community. The Outreachy program introduced me to the world of opensource and guided me through my first steps. I now feel very lucky to have applied for the Outreachy internship at the same time that JupyterHub came up with two amazing projects. I chose JupyterHub because I “clicked” with the TraefikProxy project and I was happy to find a very welcoming community that made contributing a very pleasant and not at all a scary experience.
Tim: Have you turned into someone who spends all their time contributing or do you still have other hobbies?
Georgiana: Because I currently live in the busiest/loudest city of Romania, I love to escape it at the end of the week and spend some time in nature. My favorite place to be is the village I grew up in, where I recharge my batteries walking my dogs and cooking with my mother and sister. I like painting and photography and sometimes I do both using the photos I take as an inspiration for my paintings.

Tim: Moving on to the things you will be doing as CIR, have you already picked out something to get started with?
Geo: At first, I will be focusing on trying to get an overview of what issues are feature requests, support questions and which have been solved already. I will also spend some time getting familiar with more of the JH/Binder projects. And what better way to learn about a project than to try and use it, and to be a first time contributor.
Tim: If you had to name the top three goals you hope to achieve while being contributor in residence, what would those be?
Geo: From the perspective of someone with still a lot to learn and figure out, I would be extremely happy if during this year I will grow to be the CIR this community needs. I would love to help improve the contributing experience, increase the overall productivity of the projects and become a better contributor myself.

Tim: How can people interact with you?
Geo: People can use the usual community communication channels, GitHub, Gitter and Discourse to provide feedback or ask questions and I’ll do my best to help out.
Tim: Now that we have a CIR, do people still need to contribute to the projects?
Geo: Definitely! People are always welcome to contribute. The CIR role wasn’t created to replace anything, but to be an extra pair of hands helping the daily activities around the community become more efficient.
Tim: How can people stay engaged with the CIR program or the broader JupyterHub community moving forward?
Geo: As the CIR, I am a team member just like anyone else, and the best way to stay connected is to connect is through our team channels — we have team discussions in the Jupyter Community Forum, and team information in the JupyterHub Team Compass repository (including monthly team meetings that anyone is welcome to join).