Conference: Convening Stakeholders in the Open-Source Ecosystem Workshop

Open-Source Software (OSS) is a crucial backbone for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) scientific practices and innovation. Key open-source stakeholders, including representatives from higher education, the not-for-profit sector, and industry, will be convened to share expertise with a view toward developing practical guidance for sustaining open-source software (OSS) across the research enterprise.

Representatives from these communities will identify actionable pathways that researchers and universities can take to build a robust and sustainable research OSS ecosystem. The workshop envisions two primary outcomes. First, participants will return to their home institutions with concrete and prioritized ideas about how to build sustainable research OSS communities on campus.

Second, they will publish findings from the workshop, including findings for researchers, administrators, and other stakeholders, that will focus on how to create and sustain robust OSS infrastructures in diverse university settings. These findings will also describe best practices for how to translate these "actionable pathways" into practical guidance and models that other institutions can adopt.

This project may also contribute to the health and sustainability of the academic research enterprise and open science as a whole.  

The workshop will provide an opportunity for focused discussion of sustainability issues specific to open source in university environments. The workshop will promote dialog between representatives of academic and administrative OSS communities together with the research OSS community. This latter group develops highly specialized applications designed to meet the unique needs of distinct research communities that can easily exist in isolation from each other.

Taken individually, these distinct communities may struggle to attract sustained attention and support. The core questions that will be explored at the workshop are: a) What lessons can OSS research communities learn from the experiences of academic, administrative, and industry open-source developers?; b) What opportunities exist for collaboration between disparate OSS communities on campus to improve the climate for OSS generally, and OSS for research purposes specifically?

How might those opportunities be leveraged across a wide range of institutional types, presenting different research profiles and resources?; and c) What core sustainability differentiators exist between academic and administrative open-source practices and open-source practices in science and research? What novel sustainability solutions could address these differentiators?

Specific areas for discussion at the workshop and resulting publications will include topics such as licensing/tech transfer, software development, and community building.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.