Www.julialang.org: Add a page for "Julia resources at your university/company/research center"

[Keno]

I often find that myself telling people about other groups at their own institutions that are already using Julia, or compute clusters available to them that have Julia installed, etc. I think it would be good to have a list of such resources and contact people (only if they're willing of course) to connect users with the appropriate resources at their own institutions.

[Keno]

Or maybe also "existing Julia users in your field".

[Keno]

Initial Content:

• MIT: Contact Julia Lab
• Google: There's an internal mailing list
• Microsoft: We know there's a number of internal users, not sure if anybody wants to be listed publicly, don't think there's a mailing list (maybe just have people reach out to me or somebody if they want to be connected)
• NERSC: Julia is supported on Cori, support is available for NERSC users

just off the top of my head to get a few things started.

[Keno]

NVIDIA has a dedicated Julia person also, though NVIDIA people seem to be able to find him fine, I assume they have some sort of internal directory. Might be good to list also though.

[Keno]

Same story with Intel.

[ChrisRackauckas]

What about allowing people to declare themselves campus champions? Alan is the campus champion for MIT, etc.? I know some HPC resources do that so people know who to contact.

[Keno]

Yes, that's the idea - though I want to make it slightly broader to also allow things like mailing lists or even just links to things like internal jupyterhub cluster that people may have access to even if they don't know it (e.g. I think a lot of the European and Canadian universities do).

[zlatanvasovic]

@ChrisRackauckas What makes one a campus champion?

@Keno It may be good to contact the people behind https://fluxml.ai/, as they already have a section "Researchers, users and developers of Flux" and may be able to help in finding out the resources you're looking for.

[ChrisRackauckas]

@ChrisRackauckas What makes one a campus champion?

Someone who's willing to be a campus champion 😄 . It's just a name to put up there so that everyone who's interested in Julia at a particular institution has a contact, and whoever is willing to put their name up can be one. It doesn't have to be unique, and surely if there are two names they will know each other by essence of someone had to put their name second, and thus it's already a nice way to get a growing collaboration.

[zlatanvasovic]

Someone who's willing to be a campus champion.

Really interesting idea.

I think putting this idea into effect would really make the collaboration grow well, especially on universities without much Julia users. For example, at the University of Belgrade (where I will enroll soon) and its affiliated academic institutions almost all scientific research is exclusively done in C/C++ and Python. So someone interested in Julia would be stuck with those options, without knowing anyone who could help with working in Julia.

There's also a social effect, that universities / researchers will also want to have their name on that list after they've seen the others do the same. All in all, would be good to see this. :smile:

[ViralBShah]

Sounds like a good idea!

[logankilpatrick]

The next question is how can we implement this in the site without just making one big list. I’m guessing we would need some JS

[ViralBShah]

I thought just make it big list. People can just search on the page using the browser's find.

[zlatanvasovic]

@logankilpatrick @ViralBShah Something similar to the format of https://government.github.com/community/ would be appropriate. What do you think? I'd also advise its use of tiles with images (similar to what we have for Editors and IDEs on the front page).

[ViralBShah]

Getting images for all those orgs and maintaining it to look uniform and nice is a lot of work. Also, we want to make it trivial for people to add themselves to that list.

[ViralBShah]

My take is let's do something simple and see if people find it useful. The problem is that unless the list is really long, it looks really bad (like only 10 institutions have Julia champions or something).

[ChrisRackauckas]

Post on Discourse and we might get like 50 in a day.

[zlatanvasovic]

@ViralBShah Why does it have to be orgs? If we are talking about universities, every has its own logo. Seeing the logo will help potential Julia users find their colleagues who are using Julia more easily. Even if it's GitHub orgs, their images can be fetched automatically by the org name provided.

The problem is that unless the list is really long, it looks really bad (like only 10 institutions have Julia champions or something).

I think that would be remedied by this:

There's also a social effect, that universities / researchers will also want to have their name on that list after they've seen the others do the same.

[ViralBShah]

Sorry for being ambiguous - I was referring to real organizations- Universities, companies, etc. Yeah, if they have a github org, we can use that.

[zlatanvasovic]

@ViralBShah So, what is your final say on the format of the page, should it be similar to https://government.github.com/community/? A downside of what I proposed is that it is harder to maintain (as you mentioned), but a pro is that it is more attractive and thus more appealing to the potential users.

[ViralBShah]

My suggestion is do the simple thing for now and let's focus effort on the other parts of the website. Let's build some content here and then revisit the presentation a few weeks later.

[zlatanvasovic]

Is there some specific part that you have in mind? If there's something that is currently important, t would be good to note it somewhere. What is proposed here has great potential for the user base growth.

[ViralBShah]

I meant the various PRs and issues that are open. It would be good to see those through. Each of the existing "tabs" in the menu is strange in its own way. So having a common design across the site - etc.

[ViralBShah]

I think the way to do this is to perhaps set up a google sheet and advertise heavily on discourse and slack and see how many people sign up. If we can get about a hundred or so orgs going, it may be worth having something on the website. Otherwise, a sparse list is worse than no list.