The George Washington University Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is pleased to announce that GW has become an Associate Member of the Jupyter Foundation, affirming the university's long-standing commitment to open-source scientific computing and interactive education.
The Jupyter Foundation is a directed fund of the Linux Foundation dedicated to ensuring the long-term sustainability of Project Jupyter — the open-source platform behind Jupyter Notebooks, JupyterLab, and JupyterHub. The Foundation funds critical development work including security infrastructure, accessibility improvements, release management, and documentation, while fostering a broad and inclusive community across academia, government, and industry.
"We are thrilled to welcome The George Washington University to the Jupyter Foundation. GW has demonstrated a strong and growing commitment to open source, open science, and innovative teaching and research practices—values that are deeply aligned with the Jupyter community's mission. We are especially excited about the opportunity to work together to ensure that the Jupyter ecosystem continues to thrive and remains impactful for learners, researchers, and innovators worldwide."
Rus Pandey
Jupyter Foundation Governing Board Chair
GW's relationship with Jupyter runs deep. The university was among the early academic adopters of JupyterHub, deploying its first instance in 2017 to support courses in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). Since then, Jupyter has become a cornerstone of computational instruction at GW—used in courses spanning data science, machine learning, numerical methods, and engineering computing—enabling students to engage with live code, equations, and visualizations in a shared, accessible environment.
By joining the Jupyter Foundation as an Associate Member, GW formalizes its support for the open-source infrastructure that powers so much of modern STEM education and research. This membership connects GW with a global community of universities, national laboratories, and industry partners invested in keeping Jupyter vendor-neutral, sustainable, and openly governed.
"Jupyter has been central to how we teach computation at GW for nearly a decade,” said Professor Lorena A. Barba, OSPO faculty director (and Jupyter Distinguished Contributor). "Joining the Foundation is a natural step in supporting the tools our students and faculty rely on every day.”
As part of GW's broader open-source strategy, this membership complements ongoing OSPO efforts to advance open-source literacy, support open-source contributions from students and faculty, and engage with the open-source foundations and standards bodies that shape the future of research computing.
About the Jupyter Foundation
The Jupyter Foundation is a directed fund of the Linux Foundation. Its mission is to raise, budget, and spend funds in support of Project Jupyter and its community of contributors. Learn more at jupyterfoundation.org.
About the GW OSPO
The George Washington University Open Source Program Office supports the open-source activities of GW students, faculty, and staff. Learn more at ospo.gwu.edu.
Watch: From IPython to AI Personas — The Jupyter Story
To coincide with GW joining the Jupyter Foundation, OSPO Faculty Director Lorena A. Barba delivered a keynote at OSCON 2026 tracing the project’s evolution. From its origins as a scrappy interactive Python prompt to its current role as a global platform for interactive computing, the "Jupyter Story" is fundamentally about making computation a narrative medium.
In the keynote, Professor Barba highlights two critical frontiers for the future of the ecosystem:
- Scaling Education via JupyterLite: How browser-native computing (using WebAssembly) can provide zero-cost, high-performance environments to millions of learners worldwide, breaking the "unfeasible scaling blocker" of traditional cloud infrastructure.
- The AI Frontier: The shift in Jupyter AI v3 toward "Configurable AI Personas," allowing educators and researchers to assemble teams of AI agents—such as Socratic tutors or domain experts—directly within the notebook.