Reply to this plus 2 comments up. Hub spawns _servers_, not kernels. There are a lot of indirection layers, and indeed, being able to _view_ a notebook without starting a kernel is on the todo list. The multi user collaboration is in progress, it's more complicated than it looks. One of the issue is that if this is a "solved" [with many quotes] problem for static documents, as soon as you have code execution it becomes really tricky. The kernel need to run as someone, but who ? The owner of the document ? What are the permission you give to who and how ? There are some case where there are possible answers, but which are really hard to tackle in a generic way across programming languages and various kind of deployments. Ian has an already well advance JupyterLab Prototype that you can connect to Google Drive for live editing. If your company is interested in funding something like that, feel free to write to any of us privately (git log, and grep to find emails), and we can likely setup a contract with numfocus (non profit that handle our funds), the advantage will be that it will be tax deductible for your company (unlike most of gofundme campaigns).