Navigating the Post-Workshop Fog: a Path to Myst

by Chiara Marmo and Serena Bonaretti

From June 15th to 17th 2026 a Jupyter Workshop took place at Paris-Saclay University : “Demystifying MyST Markdown in education”. The workshop combined presentations in the mornings with collaborative sprints during the afternoons. It has been funded by the Jupyter Foundation and SaclAI-School.

Milestones

• Improving documentation and tools for easier deployment even for non-specialists.

Freek Pols from Delft University and Brigitta Sipočz form CalTech presented some examples and challenges in publishing courses and documentation at large scales. Angus Hollands, MyST maintainer, made an in depth presentation of Myst and JupyterBook2. Guided tutorials introduced participants to complete a Jupyter Book workflow. The participants learned how to create their first Jupyter Book, and how to publish it.

• Text notebooks as first citizens.

Marc Wouts and Yahya Heni discussed the path from jupytext to jupyter-plainb to open and execute plain markdown text notebooks directly in Jupyter Lab. Two Jupyter Enhancement Proposals (JEP) has been discussed together with Jupyter Lab and MyST maintainers:

• Markdown based notebooks
• Specify the markup language and flavor

One step at a time

Over 30 issues and pull requests have been opened in the whole Jupyter ecosystem:

• documentation items: for example, about text notebooks in jupyterlite or publishing on different hosting solutions;
• feature requests: for example, single document feature in JupyterBook2, non-default application to open files in Jupyter Lab;
• adopt JupyterBook2 for software documentation: for instance itables and travo.

Sidewalks

The workshop provided the opportunity to continue previous discussions about AI in education: some participants attended the workshop “AI in Jupyter” and were able to pick up the conversation from there.

Relationships between Academia and Open Source Software communities were also topic of conversation: about Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and how their action can be connected to education strategies.

Wandering

Collaboration is a matter of trust. That’s why it is still important for people to meet in person and to know each other. It is about exchanging details, like keys to decrypt characters and aspirations. One might discover a shared passion for shoes. Another may finally enjoy long French-style lunch breaks.

When the time comes to resume the path, important steps have already been taken in the right direction.