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.

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.

Under the leadership of Michelle Barker, the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) is an organization devoted to ensuring that software is taken seriously as a research output alongside more traditional outputs like peer-reviewed papers and datasets.  Since software of all kinds is essential to nearly every aspect of scientific research, properly valuing and rewarding those who produce and maintain such software is vital to the efficient functioning of the systems of scientific knowledge production. ReSA will convene an international forum to help the science funding community better circulate strategies and approaches for the effective support of scientific software. Grant funds allow ReSA, with support from a part-time community manager, to establish this funders’ forum and produce resources covering relevant topics such as analyses of the research software funding landscape, key drivers for increased recognition of research software, and approaches to grantmaking practices and impact evaluations of investments. Following the forum, ReSA will share insights gained through blogs, white papers, and articles that further elevate the profile of research software across the research community.

This grant supports research by Philip Guo, cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego who is exploring questions around the cultural and communications gaps which occur between domain researchers and the computational staff in their employ. Questions Guo is investigating include how interpersonal power dynamics affect collaboration on research projects and how might these dynamics be addressed in order to better build and maintain open source software. Grant funds will allow Guo’s lab to employ a graduate student to assist with these research efforts.

The Tor Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds and maintains a technology called Tor, which allows internet users to safeguard their online communication by routing  traffic through sets of distributed relays in ways that protect the identity of both the sender and receiver. The technology, most commonly used in a browser app (Tor Browser), relies on a network of over 6,000 volunteer-run relays, and Tor is investing in tooling and community outreach to shore up this key piece of internet infrastructure. This grant partially supports Tor’s strategic foci for the coming year: investment in the relay network, a re-implementation of the network in the open-source Rust language, user training and support, and general data collection on network-level internet censorship.  

Most private sector software development is informed by user experience (UX) designers who work to ensure products provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users, but UX is treated as an afterthought, if considered at all, within open source scientific software. The result is that much open source scientific software with graphical user interfaces is counterintuitive and difficult to use, with predictable effects on adoption. This grant funds work by Jin Guo of McGill University and Jinghui Cheng of Polytechnique Montrйal to develop and test techniques and tools to facilitate better integration of design considerations into open source software development. An essential feature of successful UX design processes is understanding user needs and soliciting and evaluating their feedback iteratively. Facilitating such activities can be difficult, particularly on open source projects where the management team is stretched thin. Drawing on their familiarity with natural language processing and human-computer interaction, Guo and Cheng will attempt to streamline user participation in UX design through three streams of research. The first will be on tools that provide prompts, suggestions and frameworks to users to reduce vagueness and ambiguity in their design feedback, clearly demarcate problems from proposed solutions, and help ensure user comments are maximally useful to developers. The second will focus on tools that use natural language recognition to analyze, summarize, and synthesize user comments, allowing the development team to digest and prioritize feedback effectively and efficiently. The third will focus on tools that engage users in contributing pre-implementation design artifacts, like wireframes, sketches, and interface mockups.