This grant provides funding to extend a project by Laura Dabbish of Carnegie Mellon University to study women’s participation in open source software projects. Combining qualitative interviews with network analysis of large-scale project data from GitHub, Dabbish broadens the definition of “participation” beyond code commits, cataloged the various ways software projects telegraph openness to new contributors, and hypothesized that gendered difference in the social network structures men and women create explain why women on average disengage from open source participation earlier than men. Grant funds will allow Dabbish to expand her work to other open source software ecosystems while also probing the gender dynamics of “maintainers,” those leaders in open source projects responsible for the technical and social “invisible work” that holds a project together. In addition, Dabbish and her partners will pilot an extension of their methods to the study of other underrepresented minorities in open source, starting with the experience of U.S.-born Black women contributors.

Open source software (OSS) is an increasingly vital component of the scientific research enterprise, used in one form or another at every point in the research pipeline, from instrument calibration, to data collection and cleaning, to analysis and visualization, to archiving.  The centrality and importance of OSS has led to the realization within academic institutions of the need for formal mechanisms to identify and support those OSS projects most central to its researchers.  One model being explored is the creation of university Open Source Programs Offices (OSPO), special intra-university bodies charged with the support of important open source software.    This grant funds an innovative OSPO-like effort at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), led by Steven Jacobs.  The initiative, called Open@RIT, helps university researchers secure funding for OSS work, enlists undergraduates to work directly with RIT faculty on OSS projects, collects data on faculty involvement with OSS, and supports the creation of documentation and other resources that are essential to effective OSS projects.  Grant funds will support the salary of an office staff member to provide administrative support as well as funding for a pool of undergraduate students who wish to work on faculty OSS projects. The grant will help the Open@RIT effort grow, build relationships across the university, and publicize dependence of many campus activities on open source software.  The team also plans to develop a playbook for other institutions interested in launching similar efforts on their own campuses.

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a peer-reviewed academic journal that specializes in the publication of articles about open source scientific research software.  In JOSS, authors can submit a software project along with a description of its scientific use, capacities, limitations, the technical resources required to deploy it, how to access it, and its associated technical documentation.  Following submission, a ’software-native’ review (on GitHub) workflow enables community members to perform code review as well as review documentation and associated metadata. Once published, scientists who use, reuse, adapt, or modify a piece of JOSS-published software in their own research can then cite the JOSS Document Object Identifier (DOI), giving recognition to the software’s developers and creating corresponding professional incentives for scientists to contribute to the development of open source research software.  Funds from this grant support efforts to allow JOSS to better serve its authors and readers through improving and documenting a number of elements of the JOSS technical platform as well as generalizing the software review components for peer review of software outside of JOSS. Funded activities include planned improvements to the “bot” that automates much of the coordination and technical checking of software submitted to the journal, as well as the creation of developer guides, deployment recipes, and a reviewer management system.  The underlying JOSS infrastructure is itself an open source project, allowing other organizations interested in conducting automated software review to benefit from the JOSS team’s work.  

By combining archived software code with information on the operating system, application, drivers and other information about the computational environment in which a software program was originally run, The Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) can trick software into thinking it’s being run on the hardware for which it was built.  The result is a sort of software time machine, allowing historians and researchers to interact with decades old software just as users at the time interacted with it.  Even better, EaaSI’s emulations require no special equipment to execute.  Anyone with a web browser can connect to and use the service.  Funds from this grant, led and administered by Yale University Library (along with partner funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), support the continued expansion and development of the EaaSI ecosystem.  Planned activities include the introduction of new features, like the ability to model networked resources within emulated software and the emulation of mobile phone and tablet apps, as well efforts to grow the number of institutions hosting EaaSI nodes and to provide enhanced training and documentation for users.

Open source software (OSS) is an increasingly vital component of the scientific research enterprise, used in one form or another at every point in the research pipeline, from instrument calibration, to data collection and cleaning, to analysis and visualization, to archiving.  The centrality and importance of OSS has led to the realization within academic institutions of the need for formal mechanisms to identify and support those OSS projects most central to its researchers.  One model being explored is the creation of university Open Source Programs Offices (OSPO), special intra-university bodies charged with the support of important open source software.    This grant provides funding for the Open Source Contributor Fund at the Johns Hopkins University, a pilot initiative designed to enhance and deepen the university’s support for and engagement with faculty working on open source software projects.  Spearheaded by Associate Dean for Research Management G. Sayeed Choudhury out of the university’s new Open Source Programs Office, the Fund will make small grants of $10,000 to those open source software projects deemed to be most important to campus researchers.  The 16 projects supported over the grant period will be selected through a combination of voting and data analysis of research software dependencies. In addition to surfacing appropriate projects for support, the nomination and voting process will be used to canvass the use, development, and maintenance of open source software across Johns Hopkins. Choudhury and his team will also produce a playbook and other open source tools for use by other institutions who wish to implement similar programming in support of open source development.

L Less heralded than innovation or the creation of new technologies is the maintenance of technological systems: the sometimes unsexy but always vital work of keeping these systems running over time. Maintainers update older systems to be interoperable with newer ones, find and fix bugs, develop and install patches to ensure security and stability, and scan the horizon for new threats to the continued operation of the system. This grant provides three years of funding to The Maintainers, a network of scholars and practitioners devoted to providing support to those involved in the maintenance of critical technological and social systems.  Founded in 2015 and directed by Andrew Russell (SUNY Polytechnical Institute), Jessica Meyerson (Educopia Institute) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech), the Maintainers holds conferences and workshops, connects practitioners and researchers, develops and disseminates best practices, and advocates for the essential social role played by maintainers and their work.  Grant funds will be used over the three year grant period for a number of activities to help build and strengthen the maintainer community, including numerous virtual and in-person events, the creation of two new discipline-specific maintenance subcommunities, the development of new tools and infrastructure for use by the community, and the creation of a strategic plan focused on long-term sustainability.