Anatomy of an OSS Institutional Visit

I recently visited the UK Meteorology Office, a moderately large organization that serves the weather and climate forecasting needs of the UK (and several other nations). I was there with other open source colleagues including Joe Hamman and Ryan May from open source projects like Dask, Xarray, JupyterHub, MetPy, Cartopy, and the broader Pangeo community.

This visit was like many other visits I’ve had over the years that are centered around showing open source tooling to large institutions, so I thought I’d write about it in hopes that it helps other people in this situation in the future.

My goals for these visits are the following:

1. Teach the institution about software projects and approaches that may help them to have a more positive impact on the world
2. Engage them in those software projects and hopefully spread around the maintenance and feature development burden a bit

Step 1: Meet allies on the ground

We were invited by early adopters within the institution, both within the UK Met Office’s Informatics Lab

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