Community Relations

Community Relations#

One of 2i2c’s key differentiators is how we combine our technical expertise with social knowledge across science, education and open source communities. We call the social side of that work Community Relations, which is focused on growing members’ collective impact. Community Relations is a collection of processes and services provided by the Product & Services team.

Elements of Community Relations#

There are four key elements of Community Relations, all supporting member communities’ collective impact through our shared infrastructure. Our core infrastructure service is a reliable, functional part of community building for science and education. The technical aspects of our service delivery are documented in our services and infrastructure docs. Community Relations work supports communities’ use of our core service.

Today (early 2026) many of these elements are more ad hoc than we would like, which makes it challenging for communities to engage with us and with each other. We’ll be building and refining Community Relations throughout 2026; early thoughts are captured in our services strategy.

Community Experience & Enablement#

This element focuses on the product itself, and on the ways we support its adoption and use by our member communities. How good is our community-facing documentation? How quickly can a community get from “zero” to “hello world”? Community Experience and Enablement are practices that advocate for all 2i2c member communities back to the product team. Part of how we do this today is via hands-on work in support of communities, so this overlaps significantly with service delivery (onboarding, community enablement, offboarding). Elements of Community Experience and Enablement include:

Welcoming new communities and helping them navigate the service
1:1 problem solving / community enablement
Other forms of learning together
Offboarding & handoff

Network Effect#

This involves hands-on community management and curation, nurturing the places where communities gather, like a Discord server, forum, or GitHub. It’s about fostering connections between member communities, not just to them. Important point: this needs to be achievable within 2i2c’s means.

Shaping and enabling collaboration across boundaries
Showcases & early access to new infra & docs
Help communities showcase their own work

Co-funding and Co-creation#

This is collaborative, hands-on work with one or many communities to build, test, upstream and learn about new platform & service features. As such it overlaps significantly with platform delivery (new features in the product process, project management of feature delivery).

Dedicated, delivery management for complex community engagement
Previewing, influencing and seeing progress on 2i2c’s roadmap
Refining and shaping work together