UT-OSPO Summer 2024 Update
UT-OSPO Summer 2024 Update
New Resources
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!
People Happenings
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!
What We’ve Been Up To
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.
Coming Up!
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.
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!
First Quarterly Report: August to October 2023
Internal Work
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.
University Work
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.
External Efforts
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.
What we’ll be up to in Quarter 2
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!