Project Pythia: Three Years of Community Building Through Open Source Technology and Education

Project Pythia (ProjectPythia.org) is an online hub for tools and community in authoring and sharing high-quality Python learning resources in Earth System Science. Open source, open data, and community developed, these resources support the Pangeo community with a focus on sustainability and accessibility. Researchers, developers, and educators across disciplines and institutions contribute to the project to create resources for synchronous and asynchronous education and training for the global geoscientific Python community.

This submission reflects on the milestones of the first three years to introduce the audience to the Pythia Portal, Pythia Platform, Pythia Foundations, and Pythia Cookbooks. We highlight technical and community successes along the way, including a focus on GitHub and Jupyter Book infrastructure to support community authorship, attribution, and reproducibility in Pythia Cookbooks. To these ends, Project Pythia has developed automated infrastructure for code and content health-checks, tested reproducibility, and standards-based citation generation. We review 2023 for the project, including development of this infrastructure and hosting of the synchronous 2023 Pythia Cook-Off hackathon for cookbook generation. This hybrid event was attended by over 45 people virtually and in-person, and resulted in more than 10 Pythia Cookbooks created and more elevated by new content. From here, Project Pythia looks towards the next three years, and we introduce plans for exciting upcoming efforts with new support from the NSF.