Just want to say thank you all for this excellent discussion. I appreciate everything that people have shared. It’s not an easy conversation.
I think at the core is a central question that we have wrestled with since the beginning:
What does it mean to be “part of” Pangeo? And do we want more people to be part of Pangeo?
Pangeo in its current form has gotten very hung up on operating cloud infrastructure (at least as measured by the weekly checkin meeting agenda), and I’m not sure this is a good thing. It’s quite narrow compared to the original goals of the project.
One model is that a successful Pangeo may be largely invisible to most people, working behind the scenes to development between different packages and advance science use cases. In that case, our goal may not be to recruit more people “into Pangeo” but rather funnel them towards other projects (e.g. Xarray, Jupyter, etc.)
Another model is that Pangeo orient itself more towards scientists and less towards developers, becoming a place for scientists to get help on applying open-source tools to their problem of choice. In this case, we would look to cultivate more dialog and more interaction.