Our story
We created 2i2c in order to make interactive computing more accessible, powerful, and transformational for research and education.
2i2c’s founding team has years of experience in running interactive computing infrastructure for research and education. We have also developed and contributed to a number of tutorials and workshops so that other organizations could deploy this infrastructure for themselves (for examples, see the Zero to JupyterHub guide as well as the Littlest JupyterHub guide).
Over time, we learned that deploying, customizing, and maintaining infrastructure was a significant barrier to institutions that would otherwise benefit from it. Documentation and training was helpful, but requiring each organization to hire its own dev-ops architect was a non-starter. This was particularly true for under-resourced institutions such as community and state colleges. These organizations often turned to vendors that offered proprietary infrastructure products that encouraged lock-in, reduced flexibility and choice, and did not directly support open source communities.
2i2c is our attempt to ensure that organizations in research and education have access to interactive computing infrastructure that is 100% open source and community-driven, that is easy to access and procure, that requires minimal expertise to customize and run, that gives organizations full control over their infrastructure, and that provides the best interactive computing experience for the workflows of our community.
