NOTICE — This was moved from the site feedback category and was originally titled "Domain stacks" oriented at specific science-user personas. @jarrodmillman moved it and renamed it as we realized this is a big area that would benefit from more discussion about how best to proceed.
Thanks for kicking off this amazing and much needed effort!
I just suggested this idea in the SciPy2022 BoF discussion, and now I’m making a quick note of it here…
The existing documentation and organization is oriented mostly around exposing individual packages. This is important. Complimentary to this, we should consider a different entry point: “I am a scientist in domain X. What stack should I be using?” This would help people understand that each domain is probably using many different packages for their workflows, and also that these packages are used in other scientific fields.
In terms of data modeling, a stack would have a many-to-many relationship with packages.
Pangeo is an example of such a stack for people doing geoscience, weather, climate, etc. Astropy, Scikit-HEP, etc. play a similar role. Other communities may lack an existing organization but would benefit from this sort of presentation.
Speaking on behalf of Pangeo, we would consider merging our forum with this one (and maybe even our governance) if this capability existed.
I think this is a good idea. I think having a page on the website with cards for various community orgs, linking out to their website would be a good start here. After the landing page the projects page on scverse.org is the most popular (though the site is still low traffic).
Would also love to see scverse listed alongside Pangeo, scikit-HEP, and astropy
Speaking on behalf of Pangeo, we would consider merging our forum with this one
Just as a heads up, we looked into merging discourse forums when forming scverse. The tooling for migrating content isn’t great.
I like the idea though. The Julia discourse forum has this model and has been quite successful. I do worry a bit about hiding content from smaller communities.
We are still thinking about how to do this, but it’s definitely something we want to pursue
What we were thinking about is to have a landing page listing communities. What we need is people that are identified as responsible to keep this up to date for each communities (e.g. Pangeo, Astronomy, etc.).
Then this landing page would (with cards or any other presentation) link to either a page/website for each communities. It could either be an external page or we could host something. This would be defined by the person that is responsible for a specific area.
What we will try to do very soon is to have a placeholder page so that people interested in helping setting this up can help us.
I have been working on some posts for Scientific Python social media with things related to this sort of informing people about useful packages for certain things. I’ve used as a guide the cards that Mathias made for the SciPy swag GitHub - Quansight/scipy-2022-swag: attempt at swag design for scipy 2022.
We talked about this with Pamphile and Jarrod so I decided to make a “clean” document with the information I was using for the posts. I think the first thing in order to do the “landing page” is to gather the information and Mathias’ cards seem like a good start. I’m sharing the link of the hackmd where I wrote the information so maybe we can build from there:
Feel free to add any new packages or new categories. (Or fix anything in what I wrote.) I’m also going to share this hackmd on the Scientific Python discord so people can help us fill in the information with all the packages that we want to have separated by categories (domain stacks).
Once we have the information I’m happy to start the ‘landing page’ and we can go from there.
Thanks for creating that @juanis2112! I’m curious about the definition of domain here.
From my reading of the initial topic, I would think domain stacks would refer to a specific field of research, and pre-existing communities for those fields. E.g. things like: astropy, pangeo, scikit-hep, open2c, and scverse. While these often encompass packages, they aren’t strictly packages themselves.
From the current organization of the HackMD doc, it’s unclear to me where we would add communities as it seems very package centric.
I think “domain stack” may not be the right term to use here. For example, “visualization” is definitely a domain and there is a stack of tools for it – but I don’t believe there is a cohesive community bringing those packages together. Maybe a better term for what I think @rabernat was describing would be “domain communities” or “domain organizations”?
