Collaboration Cafés#

On the first and third Tuesdays of every month, the JupyterHub and JupyterBook communities host a shared Collaboration Café.

These community events are designed to enable community members to work together and facilitate discussion on any topics they need in breakout rooms. They are open for anyone to attend.

You can read more about why and how we host Collaboration Cafés in the resources below.

Quick info#

Who can join?#

Anyone interested in becoming involved in the JupyterHub, Binder or JupyterBook communities is welcome to attend a Collaboration Café. We will be delighted to have you join us!

We encourage project maintainers and experienced contributors to JupyterHub, JupyterBook and related open source communities to join too.

In a Collaboration Café you may find:

  • Contributors and maintainers discussing thorny issues that have not been easy to resolve asynchronously.

  • Maintainers prioritizing issues (including bug reports and feature requests).

  • Users of JupyterHub or JupyterBook providing additional context for their support requests, and maybe being mentored into submitting a fix to the documentation or codebases.

  • Maintainers reviewing pull requests from new contributors.

  • Community members working on funding requests, event organization and/or communications activities.

We purposefully blend these activities to support community members in understanding the (often invisible, often volunteer-delivered) work of maintaining an open source project.

Breakout rooms#

At the start of each Collaboration Café the chair should ask the group which breakout rooms they would like to create.

Breakout rooms allow us to have parallel conversations. We want to balance 1) the efficient use of our community members’ time by working on focused topics in small groups with 2) knowledge dissemination within JupyterHub or JupyterBook and across Jupyter sub-projects. Ideally, a Collaboration Café also provides 3) engineered serindipity: the opportunity to learn something you did not know you did not know!

Some rooms may include:

  • Prioritization: A room dedicated to reviewing project priorities including issue triage and PR review.

  • Onboarding: If you are new to the JupyterHub project, a member of our team can give you an introduction and answer your questions in this room.

  • Quiet working: A space to hold yourself accountable for making progress on a task!

  • Fundraising: Collaborating on grant proposals or other funding pitches.

Suggesting a breakout topic#

The best way to suggest a discussion topic is to comment in the issue corresponding to the Collaboration Café as early as possible.

Alternatively, you can add the topic directly in the framapad under the “Breakout room and agenda item suggestions” heading.

The chair will then identify who else could or should be in the discussion and plan topics accordingly.

Tips for the chair

Maintainers are often wanted - and sometimes needed - in many discussions at the same time.

It is kinder to all the humans - newer contributors and more experienced ones - to manage expectations for what can be achieved during the synchronous meeting.

Try to balance what is needed for the community over time, rather than catering to one specific need over another in every meeting.

Collaborative note taking#

We encourage everyone in the breakout rooms to take notes in the framapad. These notes are then archived in the project’s team compass repository.

Taking notes is a fantastic way for newcomers to contribute to the JupyterHub community. The notes allow community members in other breakout rooms, as well as contributors who are not able to join the synchronous meeting, to catch up on the discussions and continue to participate asynchronously.

If there are actions from the discussions, capturing those as issues in the appropriate GitHub repository is greatly appreciated.

Video conferencing platform#

As a community we have experimented with Jitsi Meet - an open source video conferencing tool - and found that the free service did not manage large groups (N>6) particularly well. We were keen to support an open source tool but have chosen (in October 2025) to move to Zoom to facilitate the most accessible experience for users of screen readers and/or with low connectivity.

Time keeping#

As of October 2025, the JupyterHub and JupyterBook Collaboration Café is one hour long, run twice per month.

The chair should make sure that there is enough time to welcome everyone, coordinate the breakout rooms, and bring everyone back with enough time to have them share a short update before the end of the hour.

Hosting a Collaboration Café#

Any member of the JupyterHub community should feel empowered to host a Collaboration Cafe if they so wish. As well as information in the following sections, you can find a checklist of action items within the Facilitator Checklist for Collaboration Cafés

Notes archive#

Each file represents one year, and entries within a file are in reverse choronological order.