The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) has formally partnered with 2i2c, a nonprofit that provides open source support services with shared digital tools and resources for researchers and educators.
BIDS is the first premier member of 2i2c’s new community network, recognizing Berkeley’s longstanding contributions and commitment to the development of open source tools and infrastructure. BIDS is a research institute – housed in the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society – with a vision to build strong connections in open science, open scholarship and interdisciplinary collaboration.
“Berkeley has long been a leader in the development and use of open source software. At BIDS, we want to support the community development of open source infrastructure – for example through NumPy, scikit-image, NetworkX, and JupyterHub – and share our experiences and knowledge directly with scientists and research institutions,” said Kirstie Whitaker, BIDS executive director. “Formalizing our partnership with 2i2c by becoming a member of their organization lets us communicate across groups.”
Improving the open-source ecosystem
Chris Holdgraf, 2i2c executive director, said his organization seeks to build connections by supporting a network of academic and nonprofit groups that are developing open source solutions in research and education. He’d like to improve the open source ecosystem by encouraging the adoption of standardized building blocks and finding ways to effectively disseminate useful and innovative tool improvements across organizations and projects.
While 2i2c has provided software engineering support for individual projects at Berkeley and other collaborators since it launched five years ago, Holdgraf said he’s increasingly seen opportunities to build more standardized and scalable connections between organizations and help them learn and collaborate with one another.
“We’re interested in making the enhancements needed for specific problems, but doing it in such a way that benefits everyone,” Holdgraf said during a recent Berkeley Open Source Program Office discussion. “We’re trying to replicate and generalize that model to make it more useful for more education and research communities.”
Holdgraf’s work with 2i2c in developing open source capacity in other organizations was a natural extension of his contributions to open source projects at Berkeley. After completing Ph.D. studies in neuroscience, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Jupyter co-founder Fernando Pérez, helping develop open source communities and tools including JupyterHub and Jupyter Book. As part of that work, he co-created the Berkeley DataHub interactive computing service for the Data Science Undergraduate Studies program.=
Enabling scientific research, learning and collaboration
Many faculty and students on campus have found these open source tools and others to be essential for research and learning.
BIDS faculty affiliate Carl Boettiger is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. “Open source software is the most successful mechanism humans have ever invented to collaborate and extend upon the work of others,” he said.
“The success of the scientific enterprise relies not on individual contributions, but on the ability to share, reproduce and extend the ideas of other researchers,” Boettiger said. “While we still tend to think of science as progressing through scientific journal articles, these are – with increasing frequency – just summaries of data collection and analysis expressed in computer code. Methods we implement as open source software can be readily communicated, adopted, applied and modified in research and application settings far beyond the reach of any academic publication.”
Whitaker said she and others are committed to making sure Berkeley continues to play a collaborative role in the development of open source infrastructure.
“BIDS is ideally positioned to help build the next era of public research infrastructure, serving as a connector of the active open source community within Berkeley to other research and university partners collaborating with 2i2c,” Whitaker said.
