In March, the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Monthly Knowledge Exchange invited the JupyterHub team to share learnings and discuss their recent roadmapping workshop held on February 25 and 26, 2026. These monthly meetups are lively conversations for people to share their experiences with open source software, discuss achievements and current projects, and create a collaborative community. Featured guest speakers included Arielle Bennett from the Alan Turing Institute and Min Ragan-Kelley from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science
Sharing Knowledge Across the Community
JupyterHub is an open source project, meant to serve a variety of users and enable collaboration across teams, such as researchers and students. In order to ensure that the project is effective, the roadmapping workshop brought together stakeholders, developers, and deployers to establish a plan and determine how to best meet various needs.
The goal of the workshop was to determine what JupyterHub should focus on over the next three years. This included mapping the current landscape, understanding what value JupyterHub provides that no other tool can, and determining if there is anything the team should stop doing. Through individual and team brainstorming sessions, the team sought to understand current possibilities and where JupyterHub could be effective.
During the knowledge share out, the team shared reflections from the workshop, including managing an asynchronous team, developing relationships, and ensuring sustainability. By providing this retrospective, the team hopes others can apply learnings to their own projects.
Managing a Global Team
While the globally distributed team of JupyterHub is an asset, when planning the workshop, the team had to consider how to accommodate for multiple time zones. A fully synchronous meeting was not possible, with colleagues across Europe and the United States. Thus, the team decided to try overlapping sessions across Berkeley, CA, and Cologne, Germany, with German colleagues beginning their sessions ahead of those in the United States. The team focused on discussing overarching goals during synchronous sessions. This structure allowed the team to be more flexible and adaptable.
Photo: Working with an asynchronous team across time zones
Sustainability of the Roadmap
Additionally, the team highlighted the importance of understanding what stakeholders and community members need from the roadmap. To ensure sustainability of the roadmap, the team modeled 2i2c’s processes to develop initiatives from the roadmap. This process includes mapping the problem statement, proposed solution and implementation, and how it will fit into the ecosystem. As Yuvi, Co-founder of 2i2c, explained, this structure helps both developers implementing the solution and other users of the roadmap. Furthermore, the process can be ingrained with daily workflows, keeping the focus on initiatives and ensuring proactive forward momentum.
Building a Team
Finally, the team emphasized how this meeting fostered collaboration and bridged the gap between users and maintainers of the platform. As Shane Knapp, Tech Lead at Cal-ICOR said, sometimes priorities between developers and users are different, but “having a voice in the process was empowering.” Chris Holdgraf, 2i2c Executive Director, also noted that bringing different groups together was effective for building relationships, and to understand who the team is beyond “just names on a website.” Having people together in one room, virtually and in person, ensured people were heard and felt like they were working as a part of a larger team.
Photo: Part of the in-person team at AI Futures Lab in Berkeley, California
Looking Ahead
The knowledge share out highlighted the importance of community and collaboration. The roadmapping workshop itself was an opportunity to cultivate teamwork, develop new processes, and shape the future of JupyterHub. By sharing these experiences with a wider community, others can leverage this knowledge in their own projects as well.
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