In the first three months of my work as a JupyterHub and Jupyter Book community manager, I mainly focused on getting to know the people and the projects. Starting this month, I am taking action to support the work of the two communities. Here is what I am working on.
JupyterHub: Organizing the HubDash and the User’s survey¶
On 30 November and 1 December 2026 we will host the 🟢 2nd HubDash, after a successful 🟣 first edition. The HubDash is a two-day online event where we will work on various tasks to enhance the support for JupyterHub and its community.
One of the main activities during the HubDash will be the analysis of the outcomes of a JupyterHub User’s survey we are creating. The aims of the survey are to identify new potential area for development and to collect use cases, as requested by users, so that they can learn from each other — and we can learn from them! We are working on the survey during our Collaboration Cafes.
To get the initial conversation started, we began with a draft that I had prepared. I intentionally added more questions than what we would ultimately need because the idea was to create a large pool of possible questions that we could choose from and refine together. I also included a relatively large proportion of multiple-choice questions to make the survey quick and easy to complete while still collecting the information we need.
During our first Collaboration Cafe of the month (1 September 2026), we spent about five minutes at the beginning reading through the draft. Some people added new questions, while others suggested changes to the existing ones. We then went through the survey together, discussing the initial sections and questions.
After this first round of discussion, we sent the survey out for some initial feedback. One of the main pieces of feedback was that the survey was too long - as expected! In addition, another useful piece of feedback was that the open questions allowed for answers that were too broad. So, instead of asking open questions like: What lessons did you learn? we changed to: What were the top three lessons you learned?. This change should make the question not only faster to answer, but should also make the answers easier to analyze.
During the second Collaboration Cafe on 15 September 2026, we took another big step forward with the survey: we reduced the number of sections from eight to four! The survey now includes a section about the deployments (covering both hardware and configuration), as well as more social and experience-focused questions. We are continuing to work on the details of the questions.
In the next month, we will continue to work through the details of the individual questions, making them as clear and focused as possible and removing anything that does not fit within the scope of the survey. Then, we will send it to a few people for review. We will incorporate their feedback and make the final adjustments before sending the survey out widely.
This is our timeline for the coming months:
Oct 6: Finalize questionnaire draft + send to 2-3 responders/reviewers
Oct 20: Adjust questionnaire based on feedback + send out to contacts and post on social media
Nov 3: HubDash Planning
Nov 17: HubDash Planning
Nov 30 - Dec 1: HubDash!
This year, the HubDash will be in collaboration with The Turing Way Book Dash, the group who created the concept. The two communities will have joint sections where we will introduce ourselves and discuss the achievements we have made. We will then have separate breakout rooms where we will work on the analysis of the survey mentioned above (and other tasks!) while they update and enhance The Turing Way, a handbook for “reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science”.
The registration form for the HubDash will be available in October. Stay tuned!
Jupyter Book & MyST: Changing gear!¶
In the Jupyter Book & MyST community we are experiencing an exciting shift in gears! Since the beginning of September, we have started to organize our work differently. We now work in two-week iterations. That is, we organize our work into tasks that can be accomplished within a two-week time frame.
New iterations start every second Tuesday, when we have a 30-minute meeting to share our experiences from the previous two weeks and review the results. During the same meeting, we also plan the tasks for the next two weeks based on what remains to be done and what we want to achieve next.
In addition, we continue to meet every Monday for the working sessions, where we share technical expertise and suggestions, and provide input to one another. These meetings have a very nice energy and the developers are genuinely excited about improving Jupyter Book & MyST!
To keep track of our progress we created a GitHub Project. For every task, we create an issue, which will be closed when the corresponding pull request is merged. The challenge in this process is to properly implement the principle of “divide and conquer”, that is, to divide larger tasks into smaller tasks that are achievable within two weeks!
On my side, I always learn a lot and I feel like with every meeting I take a small step forward in understanding the technical aspects of these projects — which is super interesting!
But beyond learning, I am also finding my way to contribute to the projects. I am looking for ways to 🟢 improve the relatioships between the two websites jupyterbook.org and mystmd.org (I talked about the two websites in my previous post). I would also love to highlight of MyST’s special features, such as cross-referencing and embedding solved computations. And I would like to work with the developers to agree on and document the terminology used across the two projects, explain how the two tools relate to each other, and provide more context around the key concepts.
I hope that this will be useful for new contributors, who might benefit from clearer documentation and additional context. And I hope that this will be useful for users as well, especially for those who aspire to transition from users to contributors.
And more!¶
During this month, I also worked on other activities, including:
Co-authoring the blog post about the release of JupyterHub 6.0
Releasing the latest version of Jupyter Book (2.1.7) and writing its associated blog post
Preparing the presentations for the Jupyter Mini Summit at the Open Source Summit Europe in early October (I will report about it in my next blog post!)
Coordinating the Collaboration Cafes and achiving the notes
As a member of the Jupyter Community Building Working Group, contributing to the submission of a Community Proposals to request funding for Jupyter Community Workshops in 2027
Written two reports for the Jupyter Foundation about my work as a community manager.
And that’s it for this month! See you next month!