Dask User Summit 2021

Dask is organizing a user summit in mid-May. This will be a remote event focused on bringing together developers and users of Dask and the distributed PyData stack in different domains.

User Summits like this are particularly important for a project like Dask which serves such a diverse set of use cases. Dask’s user communities include industries like finance, government, health, geoscience, imaging, machine learning, and more. These communities often have very similar problems, but don’t often communicate with each other.

User summits provide a venue for disparate domains to connect over shared technology challenges. Often a solution designed for one domain is useful for others. As technologists, this sharing is critical in order to promote consistent and high quality software solutions across domains, rather than silo’ed solutions.

History

We organized a summit a year ago, focusing mainly on developers. This was a fantastic time and resulted in a surprising amount of consensus building and forward movement both in technological and domain-specific directions.

For more on our summit last year, see this post.

Organization

We’ve asked NumFOCUS to organize this event for us. NumFOCUS runs the highly successful and community oriented PyData conference series, and had great success with their remote-first PyData Global conference late last year.

Tickets are intended to be reasonably priced on a sliding scale, with assistance given to any in need.

Open CFP

I would like to encourage people submit proposals to talk at summit.dask.org.

I would like to especially extend an invitation to those who are new to the Dask community, or new to speaking in general. This year we’re especially trying to highlight use cases of Dask, rather than developers pushing the technology forward (although these talks are of course welcome as well).

If you have an idea for a talk then please submit something and we’ll work together on making it fit. Alternatively, if you have a colleague that you think would enjoy or grow from speaking then I encourage you to encourage them as well.

Workshops

Finally, I’m excited about an experiment that we’re running this year with workshops. These are intended to be two-hour blocks of time dedicated to a particular topic, organized by a specific community member (perhaps you?). If you have a consistent theme for a set of 3-5 talks then this option gives you the ability to curate and control a dedicated block of the conference. You can invite your colleagues and collaborators. We’ll handle the conference infrastructure while you handle the content.

We stole this structure from workshops at larger academic conferences. We think that it fits Dask well specifically because of the federated nature of our community. We hope that it gives space for sub-communities to assemble and better establish cohesive working groups.

Themes in the past have included topics like Pangeo, RAPIDS, workflow management, imaging, and performance.

Apply to speak

Again, I encourage you and your colleagues to submit applications to speak this year in May. The proposal page is at https://summit.dask.org/present/#guidelines