Rochester Institute of Technology
To provide continued support for faculty open source software needs and build capacity for external partnerships at the Rochester Institute of Technology Open Source Projects Office
In 2020, the Sloan Foundation provided support for an effort led by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Stephen Jacobs to design and launch an undergraduate-anchored program—LibreCorps—to support faculty software projects across the RIT campus. Aimed at both eliciting demand for and establishing the value of open source software projects, LibreCorps is an experiential learning program where students are deployed to work on real world open source software and data projects, supporting faculty partners with direct software development as well as community management, documentation, design, and other forms of non-code contribution. This pilot was successful, with LibreCorps having supported at least 24 faculty-driven software projects on topics ranging from computational astrophysics to ecology to data visualization to cybersecurity to Deaf education. Funds from this grant provide continuing support for this effort under the broader Open@RIT initiative, supporting two core staff members who are tasked with building relationships, scoping projects, triaging requests, and otherwise ensuring that the program runs smoothly.