Spring 2024 Update
Welcome to our latest update for the University of Texas Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO). We’re thrilled to be up and running, and are enjoying meeting and working with many of you across the UT community to help support open source software and collaborations.
The vision of the UT-OSPO is to engage faculty and students in working with open source software at different levels of our Participation Pathway, which involves supporting the use of open source software through contribution, sharing, accepting external contributions, and ultimately connecting with the broader ecosystem of community-supported open source projects. The UT-OSPO is:
Offering training and individualized support for faculty, students, and staff who want to grow their open source software projects.
Providing resources for researchers to better understand Open Source projects and collaborations.
Helping to document the value and return on investment of open source work.
Facilitating relationships with UT organizational units that are working with Open Source software.
Getting the Word Out
Our biggest priority in Year 1 is to get the word out to as many UT Austin Schools, Divisions and Units as possible, and so Director Angela Newell has begun her tour to reach out to meet with research support offices to introduce ourselves and to understand what kinds of support would be useful for those communities. So far, she’s been able to meet with the Deputy Vice President for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Endeavors and Director of the President’s Good Systems Initiative; the Director of Faculty Development; the Director of Investigator Skill Building for the OVPR; Research Deans of the College of Natural Science and Engineering and Molecular Biosciences; the Director of the NSF Funded AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning; and the Masters of Data Science program.
This has included introductory presentations for the University Development Office and will include presentations at faculty and department chair meetings in the Colleges of Natural Science and Engineering in June. The UT OSPO will be announced at the Faculty Orientation and Round Up and the Researcher Resources Conference in the Fall. The focus for the summer meeting will move to Liberal Arts, the Humanities, and the professional schools. If you have suggestions for other visits, please let us know.
Along with being announced in the Faculty Resources Newsletter and upcoming newsletters for the Colleges of Natural Science and Engineering, the UT OSPO is getting linked into and listed at various campus resources, including the UT Libraries Research Data Service listing, the UT Libraries Research Computing Resources, and as part of the call in/email services for the UT Help Desk.
We have developed a facilities statement for inclusion in grants and are now registered in the University research impact partner database. We have also been included in communications from the OVPR and met with the UT Development Office to share how researchers might leverage the OSPO as a research support when seeking funding.
PI Jennifer Schopf met with all of the CIOs in the State of Texas, which includes all CIOs for major State agencies as well as all public university CIOs. Schopf introduced the Open Source Program Office concept and the work of the UT-OSPO to the CIOs. She engaged in a discussion about the power of OSPOs to help universities and public organizations deal with software, research, and grant requirements.
As part of our work to publish Best Practice documents for common open source software needs, we’ve started by giving a good overview of why project chose to use the open source approach, what some pros and cons are to common open source licenses, and a set of coursework available via linked in and coursera to the UT community on open source topics. We are working with CURIOSS to share these documents with our fellow university OSPOs. If you have ideas on other Best Practice documents you’d like to see, or other additions to the web site, please let us know!
We’re also continuing to support consultations related to Open Source as part of each of our core partners: UT LIbrary Consultations; IT Services Consultations or Help at TACC. Questions can range from how to engage in the software development process, to what do I need to consider in terms of open source for my grant submission. You can also always reach out to us with questions at ospo@austin.utexas.edu, or we’ve set up at UT OSPO slack channel you can join here: https://join.slack.com/t/ut-ospo/shared_invite/zt-2j69vfptu-TA~CFu1_wwK…
Presenting and Publishing!
The team is ramping up the number of meetings we’re attending and hope to share information about UT OSPO even more broadly in the upcoming quarter. In November, we gave a lightening talk and had a poster at the UT GIS Day, which emphasized the theme of “celebrating open geospatial science”. In December, we met with all of the Sloan Foundation funded University OSPO projects at Carnegie Mellon, where we presented our UT OSPO progress to date and participated in sessions discussing how OSPOs across the country can work together.
Our team led a two-day Immersive Python Workshop, held at the Perry-Castañeda Library Scholars Lab, on January 11 and 12. This workshop covered the basics of Python, showed attendees how to utilize Python in specialized research workflows, and provided participants with hands-on experience sharing code on GitHub.
We co-funded TACC training in May focused on Version Control with Git, which covered the essentials of Git, GitHub, and GitHub Actions, and have plans to co-duns several more training events in the coming year.
We’re also getting the word out about how we categorize interactions with open source software projects, James Howison and Jennifer Schopf published an invited Blog post for the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) in February that detailed our approach and walked through Schopf’s NetSage software project as an example of how communities interact.
Michael Shensky presented his work to identify open source projects at UT Austin as part of the monthly meeting for the national CHAOSS group. This work will result in the development of a UT Austin Innovation graph that will help with assessment of our open source ecosystem and hopefully help facilitate communication and collaboration between members of our open source community.
Upcoming Events
Looking ahead, we are focused on meeting more of you, developing our resource center and help desks, offering additional consultation, and looking forward to a summer filled with training, including:
Immersive Python Workshop
August 15-16, 2024, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
The University Libraries will present provide a thorough introduction to using Python in research and introduce attendees to the process of sharing code through GitHub
Train the Trainers
August, 2024
The Office of the CIO will offer a training course to campus IT, Libraries, and research staff on how to help researchers begin open source projects and connect with the UT-OSPO as they move through the UT-OSPO Participation Pathway.
University’s Inaugural Research Services Conference
August, 2024
The Office of Investigator Skill Building, part of the VPRs office, will be offering this new university-wide meet up, and OSPO will be presenting at it.
New Faculty Symposium
August, 2024
The Center for Teaching and Learning will be offering this meeting for new faculty, but it also includes an All Faculty portion, which the OSPO will be presenting at.
In Other News...
On a personal staff note, we would like to congratulate Alex Marden on completing his dissertation and earning his doctorate degree from the Geography and the Environment Department in the UT Austin School of Liberal Arts. Congratulations, Dr. Marden!