Tim Monko
I am a full-time maintainer and community manager of napari, an interactive multi-dimensional Python image and data viewer, and its plugin ecosystem. I work to extend the plugin ecosystem and help scientists achieve their goals with image analysis.
he/him
napari
Community Manager
Session
Foundational Python libraries provide critical functionality that diverse communities of downstream developers and users depend on, yet the teams maintaining these libraries must make hard choices about where to spend limited resources. Often, gaps in awareness between a core project and its broader community silently erode trust, collaboration, and sustainability. This talk shares lessons from a community-driven sustainability initiative to (re)-connect napari—a foundational library for interactive, multi-dimensional image and data viewing built on the scientific Python stack—with its ecosystem of over 580 community-developed plugins. Napari plugins are built and used by scientists, from complete Python novices to cutting-edge code experts, from the biological to physical to social sciences, and beyond. Through a working group that brought together the napari core team, plugin developers and end users, the plugin sustainability initiative discovered that new avenues for communication and collaboration lead to shared ownership of the ecosystem's progress. This talk will discuss what engagement approaches worked, what has not worked, what surprised us, and what any Python project with downstream developers can take away about sustainably growing and maintaining a community and its software ecosystem.