Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are an organizational innovation developed initially by companies in the tech sector as a way to institutionalize support for open source software projects of strategic relevance to the business’s interests, market, and workforce. The innovation has begun to be adopted by universities, with OSPOs being created as a useful formal mechanism for supporting open source software relevant to the research and teaching interests of faculty. University OSPOs offer training and support for faculty, students, and staff who want to grow local software efforts into healthy open source projects, aid faculty contribute to existing projects, document the value of open source work and facilitate relationships between researchers and other academic units like technology transfer, research computing, or the library. Funds from this grant support an ambitious set of activities at the University of Vermont developed by a group of people from three different parts of campus: the Library, the Vermont Complex Systems Center, and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Led by Juniper Lovato and Bryn Geffert, in the Vermont Complex Systems Center and Library, respectively, the team will build relationships with university stakeholders to create infrastructure for centralizing open-source activity, engage the broader community around an initial set of open-source projects, conduct trainings and create educational materials, and use all of the above as a case study to conduct open source ecosystems research.

Funds from this grant support the Trailblazers Program, a new awards program administered led by Alicia Gibb Seidle at the Open Source Hardware Association that will identify, recognize, honor and support leaders who have launched innovative open source hardware projects on college and university campuses around the U.S.  Up to eight award recipients will receive grants of between $50,000 and $100,000 to expand and augment their open source hardware documentation.  In addition to providing support to promising projects, the awards will raise the profile of winners within the open hardware community, encourage documentation of best practices, and signal to university administrators of the value of open hardware projects to the academic community.  Additional funds will allow the winning cohort to assemble together twice in the 2022-223 academic year, enabling winning projects to network, share strategies and lessons learned, identify common values and needs, and begin to build the core of a community of practice among open source hardware practitioners working in academia. 

Virtual scholarly events usually involve some combination of videoconferencing and chat wrapped around a conference platform that manages the abstracts, papers, slides, and other material accompanying the live or recorded presentations. One such conference system is OpenReview, an open source software toolkit created by Andrew McCallum that has become the standard submission and review platform for many of the major academic conferences in artificial intelligence and adjacent fields.  User feedback about the platform over the past year has identified the importance of synchronous, realtime interaction at various phases of planning and holding events, interactions that are currently not well-supported by Open Review or its competitor platforms. Funds from this grant will allow McCallum to add synchronous discussion features to a set of points in the OpenReview conference workflow, from deliberations by reviewers and program committees to the actual talks given by presenters. Several event organizers are already lined up as testers and early adopters, from relatively small community workshops to the massive NeurIPS conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning.  All developed code will be made available in full on GitHub.

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are an organizational innovation developed initially by companies in the tech sector as a way to institutionalize support for open source software projects of strategic relevance to the business’s interests, market, and workforce.  The innovation has begun to be adopted by universities, with OSPOs being created as a useful formal mechanism for managing relationships with ecosystems of open source communities that play important roles in universities missions in research, teaching, and public service. Funds from this grant support an ambitious set of activities at the University of California at Santa Cruz to  transcend the scope of work undertaken by the existing Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) and create a new university-wide OSPO. Led by Carlos Maltzahn and Stephanie Lieggi, the project team  plans to develop a “marketplace” of open source software projects across multiple UC campuses and associated national labs, create a postdoctoral “incubator fellowship” which will enable fellows to grow communities around their research prototypes, launch an undergraduate research experience program,  maintain a graduate student teaching fellowship focused on curricular innovation, and develop a better interface between the university and industry.  Taken together the initiative represents a significant increase in UC Santa Cruz’s ability to identify and support open source research efforts and will serve as a useful organizational model with the potential to be adopted more broadly across the academic landscape. The UC Santa Cruz OSPO will also explore expansion towards  a system-wide OSPO at the University of California.

Open hardware refers to the licensing of the design specifications of a physical object in such a way that the described object can be created, modified, used, or distributed by anyone. Open hardware sensors or other instruments present an attractive opportunity to expand the frontiers of scientific research by dramatically lowering the costs of instrumentation. They also present an attractive opportunity large-scale federal infrastructure projects. This grant supports Alison Parker at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who is leading an effort to bring open hardware approaches to scale through government agencies. Parker’s team will engage federal audiences through workshops and roundtable discussions to stress the opportunities that are presented in pre-production, co-creation, customization, and collaboration through open processes. The team will also produce white papers exploring flagship programs within the U.S. government related to low-cost and open hardware, strategies for integration of low-cost and open hardware into federal investment in science through procurement and grants, legal analyses of intellectual property as a barrier to integration of low-cost and open hardware, and topical policy issues.

This grant supports a partnership between the University of Puerto Rico Cayey (UPRC; a Hispanic Serving Institution) and the University of Buffalo (UB) that seeks to develop sustainable pathways to graduate education in chemistry, a field wherein only 6.2% of 2018 Ph.D. recipients identified as Hispanic. Grant funds will allow UPRC to host an introductory seminar; select six participants for a 10-week summer research program at UB; provide research opportunities and mentoring for the six selected participants; and provide additional academic enrichment activities—all designed in collaboration with UB chemistry faculty—to provide students with the skills and training to pursue and succeed in graduate study. Students successfully completing the program will be offered admission into the UB graduate chemistry program.

This grant supports an emerging partnership between New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT; a Hispanic Serving Institution) and Navajo Technical University (NTU; a Tribal University). The two institutions recently signed a memorandum of understanding to pursue a collaborative effort to bring safe, clean drinking water to Navajo households; demonstrating how these institutions go beyond serving students but serve their communities as well. Building on their research collaborations, the institutions now seek to develop a bridge into graduate programs for NTU students, with an emphasis on environmental science.  Grant funds allow the institutions to identify and establish a relationship with a mentor university; host a focus group at the American Indian Science and Engineering Society with other institutional leaders; facilitate surveys, interviews, and focus groups with students, alumni, and faculty to gain insights into systemic barriers that impede pathways to graduate education; facilitate interviews and focus groups with administrators to understand institutional priorities, plans, and goals; and formulate an action plan to implement change at each institution, including recommendations that will be presented to senior administrators.