Hey all - here’s another quick update on what stood out to me from the executive council and the jupyter foundation.
I think the theme for July was “ok, maybe we are all getting into too many details here”. This is true across both the JEC and the Jupyter Foundation. I’ll explain below!
The Board is trying to bring the community into more funding processes
At the Foundation level, we’ve gone through a few rounds of discussing proposals for funding, but we’ve been hitting a roadblock that it feels risky to vote on any one proposal when we don’t have an idea of what we’re missing or what kind of budget allocations we want. We were getting into the weeds on a proposal and at one point kind-of concluded “it might not actually be productive for the board to be debating the implementation details of a proposal, or writing proposals themselves for that matter.
With that in mind, @savannahbailey (our new Board Treasurer) did some amazing work to whip together a process for cycles of funding, and for inviting proposals from the Jupyter Community. This will give the group more dependable cycles of discussion, and hopefully will allow the board to spend more of its time on review and voting, rather than on putting together proposals themselves. We all agreed that it would be best for board members to write proposals with their “community member” hat on (as opposed to their board hat) and this system should help us improve.
We are still working out the details but this PR implements the broad strokes of the process we have in mind. We’re working on making it more accessible and public-facing. Naomi (our Program Manager) has been doing an awesome job with that. See below for our (WIP) process:
The executive council still struggles with capacity gaps
We’ve also had a few conversations around how to grow our capacity to act more at a strategic and community organizing level, rather than spend all of our time doing day to day things here and there. This continues to be a struggle with the team.
The Foundation has taken a lot more work to interface with than we imagined, so we’re hopeful that the broader funding proposal process described above will help take over some of the burden we’d felt in writing proposals directly.
In addition, we had some honest conversations about the fact that we struggle with delegation 
. I think this is partially because Jupyter has been used to expecting people to “just take action” since it had so little resources, and also because many of us are still growing the “muscle” to delegate as a first reflex. Either way, we’re running an experiment to intentionally lean more heavily on Naomi and her team to help us.
JupyterCon 2025 had a ton of proposals
Finally, I’ll just note that the JupyterCon team was really happy about the number of submissions for the CfP. This is both a good thing (we have a lot of interest) and a challenging thing (somebody’s got to read all of those proposals). That said, I think it’s a good problem to have, and hopefully means that we’ll have a really enjoyable and inspiring conference in November .
Community workshops are back!
Edit: adding this one because I forgot about it. The community building working group has been putting together a process for reinvigorating the jupyter community workshops! Thanks so much to that team for working on this. Check out the announcement here
OK I’m going to leave it at that, I’m sure that I’m missing things, but my goal for these posts is not to make perfect the enemy of good enough. I hope these are interesting and please reach out if you want to talk about anything!
This is a monthly experiment from Chris as part of the JEC’s efforts to open up communication and channels of transparency with the JEC and the board. He’ll do his best to keep posting these updates. He’s time-boxing them to about 15 minutes in an effort to keep them sustainable. This means they’ll be rough! He’d love feedback about whether this is useful or how they could be better.