New funding for Jupyter
We are pleased to announce that the Jupyter/IPython project has received $6M in funding from three organisations:
- The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust
- The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The grant, which is being made both to the University of California, Berkeley and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, will support the project for three years and includes new collaborations with the University of Southampton, and the Simula Research Lab in Norway.
With these resources, our team will expand the reach of the Jupyter Notebook in research, education and industry, emphasizing collaborative data science, the creation of interactive dashboards, and tools for using the notebook in rich documentation workflows.
The complete text of our grant proposal can be found here: ( html | pdf ). In brief, these are some of the main areas on which we will focus during the next three years:
- We aim to greatly improve the experience of collaboration and sharing with notebooks. Our team has already shown how to deploy Jupyter Hub in complex educational scenarios. Building on this, we will define a sharing and access model that makes sense when code execution is an integral part of the documents.
- We also want to tackle the complex challenge of real-time, multi-user collaborative editing and execution of notebooks. This continues our ongoing partnersnip with researchers at Google.
- We want to make components of the notebook readily reusable in completely different applications, so that various interfaces can quickly leverage our JavaScript infrastructure for interactive computation. Projects like Thebe from O’Reilly, and the Hydrogen editor plug in are early examples of such applications; we plan to make the architecture more flexible and easier to use. - We will develop new tools to improve the management of notebooks as documents. This includes better documentation of our own project as well as integration with technical documenation systems like Sphinx, electronic publishing formats like ePub, and stronger partnerships with the publishing community, from traditional journals to novel models. In particular, we want to leverage tmpnb and Thebe to allow any project to have live, executable examples in their documentation.
- The community is a key component to our success, and we want to recognize that more. It is always thrilling to see other projects using our architecture; with more than 40 kernels now available, and a growing ecosystem of frontends and related tools, it is hard to keep track of all things Jupyter. This is why we will start organizing an annual Jupyter Conference, targeted at developers who want to build their own tools with our platform, and as a way for our team to better understand the needs of our community. We also have reserved resources for Jupyter Days, small, community-driven events that we can support where we hope to seed local knowledge and activity beyond our core team. We will communicate more on all these in the coming weeks and months.
Watch this space as we ramp up with our new resources. We will be making a number of announcements for job openings, including some great opportunities at Cal Poly that are already out, so apply if you are interested!
We would like to thank the generous support of these three foundations, and look forward to working with them over the next three years on advancing this effort.
