2026-07-20 –, Room 1.19 (Ground Floor, Shannon)
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.
Many scientific Python projects follow a familiar arc: early excitement, rapid adoption, a burst of community-built extensions—and then a slow drift apart. The technical debt is felt by maintainers, but the community debt is seen through the erosion of trust, languishing communication, and loss of shared purpose. This talk is for anyone maintaining a Python project with a broader community, developing downstream tools, or interested in practical approaches to open-source sustainability.
In late 2025, with support from a URSSI Early Career Fellowship, napari launched the plugin sustainability initiative to rekindle the relationship between the core napari project and its downstream plugin community. The initiative started a working group of core contributors, plugin developers, and users—novice to experienced—across roles, time zones, and disciplines. This talk will share what worked: engaging the global community, oppenness to community creativity, and creating space for domain scientists to share real workflows and frustrations. It will also share real challenges: reaching folks who had already disengaged, diversifying the group over time, and including voices that don't have bandwidth for regular meetings.
The most impactful finding has been how much the community wants to shape solutions once given the opportunity, where previously folks found themselves feeling as observers on the outside. The conversation was never "what should the core team do for us?" but "how can we work on this together?" This shift—from a service relationship to shared ownership—has been the single most valuable outcome. It requires no tooling, but does require deliberate effort to maintain. The biggest barriers remain social: not knowing whether contributions were welcome, not knowing who else was working on similar problems, and not having a channel that felt heard.
The working group has converged on three interconnected efforts shaped directly by the community's priorities.
1. A combined automated and human review system emerged as the highest-impact focus. We're building automated tooling—inspired by SciPy's repo-review—that checks plugin repositories for packaging quality, test coverage, dependency health, and CI configuration. Compatibility checks via npe2api detect when plugins break against new napari releases and surface that to developers before users hit the problem. Alongside automation, human peer review modeled on PyOpenSci pairs experienced community members with plugin developers for domain-aware feedback, with a potential JOSS partnership for a publication pathway.
2. Modernized packaging and development infrastructure. We're updating the napari-plugin-template and plugin documentation based on firsthand accounts from working group members who upgraded their own plugins, with a focus on creating beginner-friendly and advanced tracks. This includes guidance on reproducible environments with pixi and uv, clearer separation of computation from UI code, and real-world-tested upgrade paths. We're exploring curated plugin bundles—tested combinations that install together cleanly—to directly address the dependency hell that drives users away.
3. Discoverability and stewardship programs. We're working to surface maintenance status, compatibility, and quality signals on the napari hub as well as improving searchability for scientist-first experiences. A plugin donation program would let maintainers hand off plugins to new community stewards rather than letting them as abandonware. We're exploring a shared GitHub organization for collectively maintaining plugins that is separate from the core napari organization, so that the plugin community can share ownership.
These efforts are works in progress, and open questions remain about sustaining the community's energy, but this talk will share how we plan to sustain the intiative going forward even beyond the life of the working group. So far, we have found bi-directional impact where downstream developers have improved experiences, tooling, and documentation and we also see an investment from downstream developers back into various parts of the core napari project. Everything being built is open source and documented for other communities to adapt. Ultimately, investing in listening and shared ownership while building technical infrastructure is what engages a broad community, and builds trust that spending time in the ecosystem is worthwhile.
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.