Social Infrastructure: The Human Work of Open Scientific Computing

Open, interactive computing infrastructure depends on more than good code. It depends on connection, understanding, and moving ideas into action: the “soft” skills that are often treated as secondary to technical work but are in fact foundational to it.

Drawing on experience building 2i2c’s community-driven model for shared research computing infrastructure, and on stories from people across the Jupyter and open scientific Python communities, this talk makes the case that connection-building work is not a nice-to-have alongside technical infrastructure;  it is infrastructure. Through four practices, grounded in open source community members’ work, we’ll explore how small actions turn big visions into reality.