GESIS Joins the Binder Federation

This is an invited post from the GESIS Leibniz Institute, collaborators on the Binder project and new members of the Binder federation

In 2015 Jeremy Freeman and Andrew Osherof posted on the Jupyter mailing list to “let the community know that [they]’ve been prototyping a way to make it really easy to turn a GitHub repo with Jupyter notebooks into a tmpnb deployment.” The temporary notebook service (tmpnb) already allowed the on-demand launch of a docker container and access to executable notebooks. However, containers had to be built and deployed manually to be used in tmpnb. First presented at the PyData NYC 2015 event, Binder simplified the way that repositories with Notebooks inside are built and launched. This democratized the publication of reproducible and executable research designs far beyond the computer sciences.

The Binder Federation

Since 2015, Binder has come a long way. The system has evolved into a collection of open-source tools such as repo2docker for building, and BinderHub for executing and serving, reproducible computational environments. The deployment at mybinder.org is a free public service for the scientific community. While from a user’s point of view, mybinder.org looks like a single web application, it is in fact a federation of independent organizations and groups that provide the service. This collaboration meets the growing demand of researchers, with currently 100,000 launches per week over a total of 8,000 different repositories. The Binder federation started earlier this year and we are happy to announce that it is welcoming its third member, GESIS.

About GESIS

GESIS — Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences is the largest German infrastructure provider for the social sciences. The institute is headquartered in Mannheim, with a location in Cologne. With research-based services and consulting covering all steps in the scientific process, we increasingly recognize the need of researchers to work with new forms of digital behavioral data. To address this need, we started the GESIS Notebooks project. This project aims to support researchers in the area of Computational Social Science with accessible analytics and publication services for data-driven research designs. As part of the project, GESIS has become a regular contributor to the development of the Binder and Jupyter open-source toolbox.

Why Join?

We all recognize the need for international collaboration in the development of software systems demanded by modern research lifecycles. However, such collaboration cannot end with the development of the software itself. We believe that cooperation needs to extend to the provisioning and integration of the services in a reliable and transparent way. Joining the federation has clear advantages to social scientists, as well as Binder users from other disciplines. Our community at GESIS can enjoy the reliability of the service, at times of lectures and workshops, and the larger Binder ecosystem benefits from resources that might otherwise be idle. More importantly, researchers are not locked into proprietary and closed solutions whose availability depends on a single entity. Joining the federation guarantees the long-term availability of hard-won research outputs in our discipline, irrespective of future changes to funding for individual groups or institutions.

Get Involved

To join the federation a combination of two resources is needed: computer power and expertise to operate the deployment. Organizations can donate computational resources over which the mybinder.org team has full control, or host and maintain a BinderHub instance for their community. If this caught your attention, consider joining the Binder federation.

Thanks to Kenan Erdogan, Tim Head, Chris Holdgraf and Lisa Posch. Furthermore, we thank the German Research Foundation DFG (project number 324867496) for their support.