Project Pythia: Building an Inclusive Geoscience Community with Cookbooks

Project Pythia is the educational arm of the Pangeo community, and provides a growing collection of community driven and developed training resources that help geoscientists navigate the Pangeo ecosystem, and the myriad complex technologies essential for today’s Big Data science challenges. Project Pythia began in 2020 with the support of a U.S. NSF EarthCube award. Much of the initial effort focused on Pythia Foundations: a collection of Jupyter Notebooks that covered essential topics such as Python language basics; managing projects with GitHub; authoring and using “binderized” Jupyter Notebooks; and many of Pangeo’s core packages such as Xarray, Pandas, and Matplotlib. Building upon Foundations, the Pythia community turned its attention toward creating Pythia Cookbooks: exemplar collections of recipes for transforming raw ingredients (publicly available, cloud-hosted data) into scientifically useful results. Built from Jupyter Notebooks, Cookbooks are explicitly tied to reproducible computational environments and supported by a rich infrastructure enabling collaborative authoring and automated health-checking – essential tools in the struggle against the widespread notebook obsolescence problem.

 

Open-access, cloud-based Cookbooks are a democratizing force for growing the capacity of current and future geoscientists to practice open science within the rapidly evolving open science ecosystem. In this talk we outline our vision of a sustainable, inclusive open geoscience community enabled by Cookbooks. With further support from the NSF, the Pythia community will accelerate the development and broad buy-in of these resources, demonstrating highly scalable versions of common analysis workflows on high-value datasets across the geosciences. Infrastructure will be deployed for performant data-proximate Cookbook authoring, testing, and use, on both commercial and public cloud platforms. Content and community will expand through annual workshops, outreach, and classroom use, with recruitment targeting under-served communities. Priorities will be guided by an independent steering board; sustainability will be achieved by nurturing a vibrant, inclusive community backed by automation that lowers barriers to participation.