Reports

The UT-OPSO officially started August 1, 2023. We held a kick-off meeting with the Core Team, the Proposal Writing Team, and potential members of the Steering Committee. This meeting went over basic plans for the UT-OPSO for the next six months, and sought advice on services that the UT-OSPO could provide, events in which the UT-OSPO could participate, and methods of communicating with researchers and about the UT-OSPO.

As part of our startup work, we launched this website and set up several mailing lists for contacting different sets of participants. We also created a hand out to be used in meetings going forward explaining what the UT-OSPO is and how the community can work with us. A UT Austin Press Release  was made public on October 25, 2023. The core team is now meeting bi-weekly, and we will be setting up regular meetings for the Steering Committee and User Committee in the upcoming quarter.

Alex Marden, GIS & Geospatial Data Coordinator, joined the staff of the UT Libraries on September 5, 2023. His day-to-day efforts will be spent providing GIS support to the campus community through workshops, consultations, and the development of online guides. As part of his 20% time working for the OSPO, he will be focused on developing services and resources that will assist campus researchers. In addition, we posted a position via the Libraries for a 70% staff member to work with the core team to help with project deliverables. This position has been widely advertised.

Quarter 1 saw us keynoting at the Texas Open Science Summit, discussing open source software and open science alongside HELIOS, NASA, and our fellow OSPO team in California. You may have also seen the UT-OSPO at our poster presentation at TACCster 2023 or heard us speaking at the Center for Networked Information Executive Roundtable.

We have provided mentoring for teams submitting software-focused grants, working with University Foundation Relations. This quarter, we focused on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Essential Open Source Software solicitation, assisting three UT Austin teams with their submissions, one of which has been invited to provide a full proposal. Based on our suggestion, CZI created a public resource of successful proposals.

The team supported two training workshops as part of the Libraries Data and Donuts series. The first session, which took place September 29th, was entitled "Creating Code for Research: GitHub, AI Tools, and Copyright" and was led by Michael Shensky and Colleen Lyon. The second session, "Open Source Geographic Information Systems (GIS)", took place on October 17th and was taught by Alex Marden. More than 120 people attended these training seminars, recordings of the sessions and presentation materials have been posted on the UT Libraries Data & Donuts Libguide.

We’ve been invited and are actively participating in several national groups with other university OSPOs, including:

• The Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS), a Linux Foundation project focused on creating metrics, metrics models, and software to better understand open source projects and to help people who want to know more about the health of the open-source projects they are engaged with;

   
• The community organizer group, SustainOSS, provides a forum that connects universities and other academic research institutions to collaborate on how to approach and work on open source together;

   
• The Community for University and Research Institute OSPOs, CURIOSS, is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded organization and partners with SustainOSS that provides a forum for discussion where research OSPOs share learnings and resources.

After the winter break, we’re planning to start visiting departments to share information about the OSPO. If you would like us to come to your school, college, or unit, please let us know at ospo@utlists.utexas.edu. We would love to share information about our resources and services.

In addition, the UT-OSPO is co-sponsoring an Immersive Python Workshop (January 11-12), that will provide a thorough introduction to using Python in research and introduce attendees to the process of sharing code through GitHub.

If you would like to get involved with the UT-OSPO, please connect with us, and share your idea for a training or service on which we can collaborate. If you would like to be featured as an Open Source Software Researcher on our website, please let us know. We would love to share your work. If you just want to stay in the loop and share this resource with friends, our mailing list is ospo.announce@utlists.utexas.edu.

We’ll be in touch as other activities are planned - thanks for being part of the UT-OSPO community!