Reflect on the last 6 months of service and refine our service offerings

[choldgraf]

Context

When we created the Alpha Service Offering, we intentionally used a relatively simple categorization of hub services, encoded as a two-by-two matrix:

• Education vs. Research
• Dedicated vs. Shared cluster

We planned on re-visiting this model after several months of experienced, and listed June 30th as the date when this would happen.

We are now past this date, and recent conversations have also suggested that we need to move beyond our current "community / service personas" that informed the original alpha service document.

Proposal

We should conduct some team conversations and interviews to understand what we have learned from the last 6 months of running the service, with the goal of making recommendations for how we should change our service offering, with a focus on the user personas we want to target with the service.

I suggest that we do this in focused conversations with the goal of making iterative improvements to what we do (rather than large brainstorms like we've got in https://github.com/2i2c-org/meta/issues/345 as I think that's a different kind of conversation).

Some questions we should try to answer, and then make recommendations for:

1. What should we change about our 2x2 matrix to more accurately map onto the kinds of communities we want to serve?
2. How can we be more precise in our service offerings for each part of the matrix? Where can we thoughtfully reduce free parameters to make it more scalable and maintainable?
3. What changes should we make to non-engineering aspects of the service, like guidance, support, and cost recovery?
4. Where does the current service feel unsustainable to our team?

We should also conduct this with a combination of stakeholders:

• @2i2c-org/tech-team
• @2i2c-org/partnerships-and-community-guidance
• A few major stakeholders that we have close relationships with

Timing

This will probably take some time to carry out. I suggest we track this as an ongoing major project. I can try to lead these conversations and steward the process, though it will need input and guidance from everybody here.

Updates and actions

No response

[choldgraf]

We've had a number of conversations about where the service needs improvement, how we need to describe it differently, etc. Rather than keeping this issue around forever let's list off the issues where we need to follow up and close it out.

Major actions to take as a result of this

• https://github.com/2i2c-org/leads/issues/137
• Define a more sustainable pricing model for our current hub service #722
• https://github.com/2i2c-org/leads/issues/136
• [Billing] Goal Q2 2023: Cloud cost billing pass through process infrastructure#2431