Summer 2024 Update

We have continued to grow our Best Practice Document series with the recent addition of ‘Contributing to an Open Source Environment’ & ‘Where to put a GitHub’. These new resources, along with our previously published best practices, serve as introductory guides for important open source concepts that are digestible and relevant for a wide range of UT researchers. We are continuing to develop resources based on feedback from our User Group as well as the university and open source communities.

The UT-OSPO has created a facilities statement, language to describe the services and resources available to researchers developing or using open source software in their research.

Consultations are in full swing. If you or your research team are looking for a one-one consultation for your open source software project, you can reach us by email at ospo@utlists.utexas.edu or visit https://bit.ly/ut-ospo-consultation to select a time to meet with us.

What resources would you like to see the UT-OSPO offer? Please let our Director, Angela Newell (anewell@austin.utexas.edu) know!

The UT-OSPO User group met June 17, 2024. Major discussion outcomes at the meeting included review of the group charter, identification of opportunities to connect more broadly with researchers on campus, and strategies for more student interaction and involvement. Our fall sessions will focus on implementing the ideas generated during our inaugural meeting and receive feedback on our summer progress.

Angela Newell has been elected as a member of the Apereo Board of Directors. The Apereo Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports and develops open source software for higher education institutions.

Bryan Gee has joined the Libraries to coordinate open research. You may see Bryan holding trainings or talks related to open source software and open research. Welcome, Bryan!

In July, we presented and participated in a workshop event with our fellow university OSPOs at the University of Vermont, discussing and building solutions for challenges faced by OSPOs in research environments.

We participated in the OSPOs for Good event held at the United Nations in July. We will participate in a working group with the United Nations to understand how OSPOs can contribute to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how OSPOs can serve as a convener for open source software development, AI, and the creation of digital public goods.

The UT-OSPO is one of four university founders of the Open Forum for AI (OFAI). The soft launch of the OFAI occurred on July 15 at Carnegie Mellon University. The goals of the Forum are to help advance ethical and responsible open source AI and support open source AI research and engage with the broader open source AI community and policy makers to promote responsible, transparent and ethical AI.

We presented at the Software Freedom Conservancy’s yearly Free and Open Source Software Conference (FOSSY) 2024 in Portland, Oregon, on August 2. Our presentation was part of the FOSS for Education track and focused on open source training for reproducibility, collaboration, and community in academic research. FOSSY served as an opportunity to connect with others working in the open source software education space and share about our experience developing training resources for open source software on campus.

On August 15, the Libraries held their second Immersive Python Workshop, which was co-sponsored by the UT-OSPO. The workshop attracted 46 attendees and provided an opportunity for them to learn how to start writing research code with Python and share it as open source software using GitHub.

We had a booth at the New Faculty Launch on August 21. More than 125 new faculty and researchers participated at the event, stopped by to say hi, and connected with our resources.

September 19, the UT-OSPO will participate in the Grad Impact and Innovation Expo from 12:00-2:00 in FAC 2.236 and virtual.

September 23-25 is the annual TACCster meeting at the Pickle Research Campus, which will include the UT-OSPO as part of their poster session. This annual TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers is a meeting of scientists, engineers, scholars, and students from across the state of Texas who use, and would like to use, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to advance their research goals. The first day highlights training sessions, including a longer version of the OSPO-supported Container Training that will take place in October.

October 4-6, the UT-OSPO will present an open source software Geoscience Hackathon, jointly with our partners at TACC and at the Department of the Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Jackson School of Geosciences. Hackathon participants will have the opportunity to receive guidance from project mentors, learn about TACC HPC resources, and contribute open source software that can be utilized by other researchers. The Hackathon will take place in the PCL Scholars Lab.

October 4, we will publicly launch the Open Forum for AI with our partners in Washington DC at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

October 7, we will be presenting a poster at the upcoming Southeast Data Librarian Symposium which will highlight the automated process developed by the UT-OSPO to gain insight into the open source software development activity of UT Austin researchers on GitHub and will discuss the connection of this project to a UT Libraries effort to measure publication of research datasets.

October 8, 14, and 21, we will be offering a three-part training series which covers containerization, version control, and HPC workflows for scientific computing, jointly with our partners at TACC. In the first session, participants will focus on collaborative coding with Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions, and workflows with continuous integration and deployment. The second session will teach participants how to build reproducible workflows using Docker. The final session explores running containers on HPC systems, including GPU usage, MPI for parallel computing, and multi-architecture Docker builds. Participation in all three sessions is strongly encouraged, as they are designed to build upon one another and offer complementary knowledge essential for comprehensive understanding. Hands-on participation is also encouraged throughout for development of practical skills for students, researchers, and developers.

October 11, the UT-OSPO, jointly with UTL, will offer a virtual training in Managing Research Code with Git and GitHub with Data and Donuts from 12-1:15 p.m.

November 20, the UT-OSPO will be featured at UT GIS Day, which takes place in the PCL Scholars Lab from 12:00-5:00 p.m..

November 19-21, we will be presenting our open source project discovery process and innovation map at the Linux Foundation Member Summit, in Napa.

Where can the OSPO show up for you? Please let us know. We would love to come and meet with your researchers and discuss how we can support them.