Resources

UT-OSPO Participation Pathway

icon outline head with body and gears

Level 1: Using

Researchers use appropriate open source software tools.

icon hand holding gear

Level 2: Contributing

Research teams have a deeper understanding of an external software community, participate in identifying bugs, and asking for new features.

icon house with gear inside

Level 3: Sharing

Software from a team is made available using an open source license and on an open platform facilitating collaboration (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc).

icon gear with globes

Level 4: Accepting

An open source project receives contributions from outside the founding researchers.

icon globes with gears inside

Level 5: Advancing Ecosystems (upstream/downstream)

  • An open source project is part of a larger ecosystem of related projects with up and downstream dependencies.
  • Project members contribute and mentor in upstream and downstream projects.
Open Source Participation Pathway

Participation Pathway Poster

Download a visual representation of the pathway levels.

UT resources

Discovery to Impact

Are you a UT researcher, staff member, or student with an idea or technology you think has potential? You’ve come to the right place. Discovery to Impact can help.

Discovery to Impact is the connection between campus innovators and industry. We cultivate ideas, uncover pathways to market, and foster commercial collaborations that translate academic research into services, treatments, and products that benefit society.

Grant facilities language for UT-OSPO

The University of Texas Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO) is a center for open source activity, connection, and training across the University of Texas at Austin. The UT-OSPO helps grow the UT open source communities and provide long-term open source software connections for researchers through a diverse program of training, high-level consultations, and best practice documentation. The UT-OSPO is jointly coordinated by UT Austin’s central IT services, the UT Libraries, the iSchool, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

More specifically, this University-wide support institute offers a variety of training courses open to students, faculty, and researchers from introductory material on the why’s and how’s behind open source to more advanced courses on using containerization to each distributed, open source software development. We offer support through the existing help desks at the UT Libraries, UT Central IT, and TACC, in addition to Best Practice Documents on our website, https://opensource.utexas.edu/. In addition, we can work directly with departments and development teams to help guide you to resources or support in-house activities, such as hackathons. For more information, please visit the website.

Open Source community websites

graphic with 4 squares of icons

US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI)

URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use , of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.

FOSS Foundation Directory

Free and open-source software (FOSS)
Welcome to the FOSS Foundations Metadata directory! We are eager to collaborate with academic researchers and open source practitioners alike on curating rich metadata about the many excellent non-profit Foundations that either host or help open source projects succeed.

UT-OSPO News

graphic with 4 squares of icons

A pathway for participation in research open source

Feb. 20, 2024
UT-OSPO core team members James Howison and Jennifer Schopf discuss maturity models and present the UT OSPO Participation Pathway illustrated with case study examples from the NetSage open source project.

UT establishes new hub for open source software collaboration, support

Nov. 7, 2023
With financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, experts from the Texas Advanced Computing Center, central IT services, University of Texas Libraries and the School of Information are collaborating to run this project.

UT Launches Open Source Software Office To Support Researchers

Oct. 25, 2023
To maximize the social and economic impact of open source software in research and education, The University of Texas at Austin has launched the Open Source Program Office, a central hub for open source activity, connection, training and support to enable open source practices as a key part of the University.
View all News

UT-OSPO Training Events

No events at this time.
View all Events