 I'm Saiz Choudhury, the head of the OSPO, or Open Source Programs Office at Carnegie Mellon University. This session is Early Lessons Learned from the University Open Source Programs Offices. I'm joined by, there we go. I'm joined by some other leaders of OSPO's at the University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Vermont, and Johns Hopkins University. Mike Nolan from the Rochester Institute of Technology and Daniel Shown from the University, or St. Louis University could not be here, but they sent notes, so I'll be reading their comments. So very briefly, one definition of an OSPO that we use in a guide that's available about University of OSPO's is it's a community convener and a center of competency to help manage, curate, and share Open Source software. And then what your institution wishes to do with that, if you can reach that state, is part of what you'll hear from this panel. So each of us is going to give a little bit of context around lessons learned in these early days, and then some of the accomplishments that map to those lessons learned. But we're really hoping you have time for your questions and some discussion. Little bit of background and context, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has funded six institutions that are represented on this panel to form Open Source Programs Offices or OSPO's and has announced a program to fund an additional set that came out in February, and I believe they're starting to make some of their decisions around that. We've created a guide or a playbook for creating University Open Source Programs Offices or exploring Open Source software within your institution. It's available at this link. There was an informational session related to the Sloan program that was recorded and it's available at that YouTube link. I put those links into the session description in SCED or SHED or however you say it. So you can take a look there and see them, but I'm also assuming these slides will be available. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Stephanie to kick us off. Hi, I'm Stephanie Elegie. I am at the University of California in Santa Cruz and I have to be really careful here not to say you see all the time because I know that means something else here. But so we're University of California in Santa Cruz. Just as a quick kind of lead into the lessons learned, we've actually been had the Center for Research and Open Source Software, which was established in 2015. And so a lot of the lessons learned kind of predate some of the OSPO work that we've done more recently. And so this is a bit more of a burger of that because a lot of the lessons we learned from the Center that we started at UCSC is kind of led into why we realized what we really needed to really focus on was creating an OSPO within the University. So those first two bullet points I wanted to look at, which are kind of showing the value of open source and that open source can be a catalyst for industry research is directly related to what we did at CROSS. And so part of the story of CROSS is that we had a very successful PhD student who was able to create a startup based on their open source research as far as their dissertation, which ended up being this open source storage system. So that was Sage Weil and Sage Weil was able to sell his company to Red Hat for a good chunk of money and then gave us money back in order to kind of recreate that process for other students. So other students who didn't have the ability to kind of work on their project after they graduated. So in interest time I won't go totally into how that structure worked but what we did learn from that is that getting our leadership on board was super helpful and having that success, that huge success of stuff really did show a value. Now not everybody can have that but there are ways and we can talk about it maybe during the Q and A of how you show your university leadership that having open source and having something that helps curate it and helps bolster it really is helpful and has value to the university. We also showed that and a part of that work at Cross really brought in a lot of industry support and again went back to the value of open source. We also as we especially moved into becoming an OSPO and not just a research center we started seeing how we were able to match mentors, students, folks who wanted to work on open source projects but didn't know who they were and we were kind of a nice central organization to work through and I'll talk a little bit about that. In kind of our accomplishments. We were, we learned to be very ready for great new opportunities and especially funding models, funding opportunities we'd ever thought about until the OSPO kind of got started and then all of a sudden we were like in really well-placed particularly a lot of the NSF funding that I think Martin talked about yesterday. We were actually, oh, this is, we're actually really well suited now to work on that. And we also learned that we shouldn't be stuck in our ideas about how the model should work. Cross worked out nice for a time being but we see that actually moving forward we'll probably gonna change the model, maybe be placed differently to where we thought we were gonna be in the university and being flexible on that was really important. So using as XTMOS but also being ready to change in case things don't work out the way you think. Quick accomplishments. I'm really proud and really excited about the fact that we're bringing, I'm sorry again, I could you see that's University of California, a University of California wide kind of collaboration and network that we're working on right now. We have a couple people in the room that are part of that and one of our programmatic activities is efforts with regard to mentorship that matchmaking I was talking about and we've been able to expand that to any UC that's interested. So any UC or sorry, any University of California researcher who has an open source project can be part of our program which helps match them with students from around the world. It's kind of part of the Google Summer of Code but we have our own activity as well and that's expanded significantly over the last two years as we opened it up to more of the University of California not just University, not just Santa Cruz specific. We've definitely seen much more sustainability through broadening our funding opportunities. We are one of the, we were lucky to get the Ferros RCN as well and we are starting up the Summer of Reproducibility this year as part of that and the NSF project that was mentioned yesterday or NSF funding that was mentioned yesterday and that's been a great helping us booster some of these mentorship programs that we have and we're definitely be also part of the NSF pose. We have a phase one grant for that which is also building open source ecosystems and all of that again was something that we probably wouldn't have been able to do if we hadn't started with the OSPO. It wouldn't necessarily have fit for us within our, just our research center. We're really excited also about a lot of the diversity and community building activities that we've been able to start doing under, especially in the last two years under the OSPO. Again, the open source research experience is part of the mentorship program I mentioned earlier and we're actually starting one that's specifically focused on under prioritized communities ones that you don't see very often in open source and that's this year and it's actually a hybrid program which is the four weeks at UC Santa Cruz and four weeks remote. So it's really great to bring students in, give them sort of a background in open source and then let them kind of work in what would be an open source community which are typically remote. We also, just an interest of time, sorry, give myself one second more. We're actually seeing a lot of opportunities, especially the last year of building relationships beyond just open source but also open science. We have the OSPO plus plus folks who are all part of the group like Said and a bunch of other folks that we work with on university OSPO as well as the to-do group which is an open source, sort of members of that which is an OSPO's from industry. And then we've also recently started working with the open source science initiative which is part of NumFocus or supported by NumFocus and we also have been members of the Linux Foundation for quite some time and that's a really helpful part of the work, helping us support kind of integration with open source communities more widely. So that's it. Hello, my name is Kendall Fortney. I run the OSPO in the University of Vermont. We're the only research institution in Vermont. So it's a very small state and we get to be in the middle of that. We were funded by the Sloan Foundation at the beginning of last year. I have been in the role since about mid-April and in that time we've kind of went through a couple of different phases. But before I get into that, I'm just kind of curious, how many people have used open source software here? This is awesome. So I do this when I actually go to classes to ask how many of them actually do this and how many of you are involved in like open access initiatives inside of what you're doing? How many are here because you're interested about creating an OSPO? Okay, all of you raise your hands. Come talk to us at the end of this. Okay, so one of the things that we kind of went through and we were beginning this is I came from working industry. I worked in tech companies for 12 years in startups and for me, you know, understanding what open source was changed when I got into academia. And that was a big part is being how inclusive to think about what is included in open source. That's open access, that's open science. It's open work, it's open practices. There's a lot of things that are not just software, which is where I came from. So that was a very big learning curve and that was really useful to kind of identify where we wanted to focus. It was also very revealing, like I've worked in large companies. Universities are very different. They are large companies, but they're also even more, you know, siloed and structured in ways that don't talk to each other. So it's like a really complex system to navigate. So that was definitely like both the learning curve to understand that. And also like once you have the understanding you can work well with those organizations with those groups you identify there are people you have those conversations. You actually can move fairly quickly. I mean, it's not like startup level quick, but still you move fairly quickly once you actually have those connections and you find people that are champions of what you're talking about. And it's also really interesting to see how incentives around open work is different for different groups. So like we were kind of going through it and be like, what are our user groups in product speak? Like, you know, our user groups can be staff, it can be faculty, you know, you talk about students, you have undergrad, you have graduate, you have postdocs. Like all of them have different incentives for doing open work. So like if I'm talking to staff, it's gonna be different than I talk to faculty and really tailoring our messages for those different groups to meet the things that they are interested in is really important, which is hence the question I just asked you. You're just in all of it, which is kind of sweet for me. Funding has a long lead time too. So like, you know, when you're working in this space, like it's been a while to understand like dig into how you get grants, how you fund organization, how you make it sustainable. Ospo's in industry, in companies, are things that are like loss prevention, not loss prevention, they're basically risk mitigation, how you make sure that you know what licenses are on the software you're using and also like developing software that you use in a company. In universities, it's kind of a different aspect of what we're trying to do. So how you develop a sustainable business model, for lack of a better word, to keep your Ospo alive. And like we've been having conversations about what that actually looks like and it's evolving, like where can we go, what can we do? The same thing, you know, building personal connections. I have like, I track all the people I talk to, so I kind of have an idea. If I wanna go back to talk to someone, I can look them up in my middle like CRM, like my customer relationship management system, that I know who I've gone to. I have over 140 conversations at this point in a year of people across every college at the university in I think, I mean, honestly, I have yet to find a list of all the offices. So most of them, I think. And like, about 40 of different community organizations outside of the university. So like, building that broad coalition, and at a certain point, like it starts coalescing, you're like, I wanna focus on these specific groups because they're the ones that are in advanced missions. But like, inevitably, I'll be like, oh, I'm doing this thing. I'm like, oh, I know something that can help you with this. And that's really useful, because a lot of what I'll suppose are kind of like this center point of a network, where we're connecting pieces from all sorts of places from each other, like from across different universities to inside the community, to across departments. We kind of live in this nether space between things. And it's also like the diversification of ways to support Ospo is like, you don't just rely on grants because that is honestly risky. Like, how do you actually develop other ways to support we're doing? How do we tie ourselves to vital institutions inside of the university that help things advance? Like, how do you build that? And I don't have, you know, like a nice checklist for you yet, but we're definitely figuring out ways that are actually gonna make that a little more sustainable. It's taken longer than I thought it would, because the nature of the complexity of living inside of that space. I think, I kind of talked a little bit of this, I was talking through some of these points, but like, we've been working on piloting open journal software for use of the university. We've been working on trying to build a large scope of public data repositories, which has its own set of interesting challenges and opportunities inside of it. We've done, we have like 15, so a lot of the work we do is with tech transfer. So we're working with them on projects. So someone's like, hey, I have this cool idea. I wanna turn this into something interesting. And I'm brought in to be like, okay, so that's awesome. Is open source part of your overall goal? Is it part of a subset of goal? There's business strategies they can use to apply open source. Those kind of things we're doing with like, I have 15 different projects. Some of them are gonna convert fully to open source. Some of them are gonna be a little bit of it. Some of them are not, and that's completely fine. We're involved in verse, well actually this is now nine grant applications. Luckily I'm not the PI in any of those. I get to kind of tag on everyone else's work of writing. I'm okay with that. And we're also working on developing a workshop talking about open practices across different disciplines. Because openness in software is different than open and open research. It's different in open design. It's like kind of bringing those people together and be like, how do we understand that ecosystem? How do we share what we've learned in that way and see how that goes? And we've done a bunch of different class lectures and going to students and talking to them about different ways of doing this. Having a lot of fun with doing the things that I do in industry, right? Like how you use some of the software you'd use at the side of the space is to do work in open source projects. And again, can I do over 120 people? A number just keeps growing. 120 people and a lot of different organizations inside of the university, and that's me. Thanks Kendall. And I appreciate you asking the question around who here is looking to create an OSPO who is doing open source already. Because I really tailor the points that I pulled out here to those who are in that position, right? Who really are thinking about either building an OSPO or just doing, working with an OSPO in some way. So my name is Bill Brannon. I have the pleasure of managing the OSPO at Johns Hopkins University. So to start, it's helpful to recognize that in most cases, open source work is already happening at your institutions. The chart on the left side of the slide illustrates code contributions by organizational groups at JHU. So you can see that there are a few groups that contribute heavily. These groups are often the most visible, easy to find, but towards the top of the chart, there are many very small lines which are those engaging in open source in smaller ways. So not all open source work is large scale application development. Much of it is simply making existing tools a little bit better or building small things, scripts and things. Considering this range, discovering the individuals and teams doing open source work can be challenging. We've found that one of the most effective methods of discovery is to provide tools and resources that these teams would like to use and then make that known. This encourages those teams to reach out, allowing us to talk to them, understand what they're doing, the kind of work they're engaged in. Picking battles is important for an OSPO because generally it's a small group of people trying to do a lot of things, don't try to do everything. Start by identifying the primary impact that you'd like the OSPO to have, then define the strategies and goals that get you going in that direction, match that capacity to the team and then you can grow from there. Expect multiple forms of engagement. The needs of a project depend on a variety of factors and not all projects progress in the same way. Providing effective support requires listening to the teams and then matching resources to those needs. Don't assume that all open source projects start the same way and that they progress along the same paths. It's often not a linear progression, so having some awareness of the fact that there's going to be variety is really helpful. Don't be afraid to experiment. Early on in the life of the OSPO at Hopkins, we conducted an experiment with gracious funding from the Sloan Foundation to create a free and open source contributor fund. This is an approach that has been used successfully in the corporate world to provide funding for open source work. Unfortunately, when we tried this, there was not yet significant awareness of the OSPO at JHU, so participation was lower than we had hoped. Really, we had hoped that the FOSS fund would attract attention and bring engagement to the OSPO, but what we discovered is that we really needed to build the community first. So when you experiment, sometimes you're gonna learn things that you didn't expect and the outcomes are going to be different, but we do intend to revisit the FOSS fund experiment soon now that we have broader awareness of the OSPO at JHU. So sometimes you can circle back around to those and give it another shot. Next, building your Rolodex, you're gonna be asked questions that you don't know how to answer and expect that to happen, which means that you need to have people that you can reach out to that you know that can answer those questions or help you answer those questions as they come up. And this really reinforces the value of the OSPO as a point of collaboration. Your list of contacts are going to include people within your institution, outside of your institution. Groups like OSPO++ are a fantastic place to start building that kind of network. And then really collaboration is the key to this. So much of the work of the OSPO comes down to making the right connections. Collaboration is required for an open source project to be successful, the same is true for an OSPO. An example at Hopkins, as Kendall mentioned, actually is working with the tech transfer office to partner in discussions around transitioning to open source, licensing, those kinds of things, recognizing that we each bring different perspectives to the table. And collaboration is really what drives that work. So moving on to some of the accomplishments. It's useful to start out by really calling out the establishment of the university-based OSPO, which is not a small thing. An open source programs office and a university was a novel idea just a few years ago. This is really still new. Significant work was required to define the value and purpose of an OSPO in an academic setting to build support, to establish funding approaches to blaze the trail. This work was done by those on this stage and others who saw that coordinated effort to support open source can bring significant value to universities. Those looking to create an OSPO today now have examples to point to at other institutions, a guide to follow, a community to lean on, and funding that's available. This goes way beyond any one OSPO and really is a major accomplishment of the community at large. So I mentioned a moment ago that the discovery of open source work at Hopkins was made easier by offering tools and resources that are valued by open source teams. So at the top of this list for Hopkins is the enterprise level code development resources available through the GitHub Campus program. GitHub is well-known. It's a very practical resource that provides clear value both for software development work and for instruction. So by providing this as a service as an example, we not only gain awareness of open source projects and other work that's going on at Hopkins, but we're able to utilize those tools to create metrics and create charts like the one you saw in the last slide. The OSPO also facilitates discussion. This seems simplistic, but really is a core tenant of the OSPO. I mean, the OSPO itself is intended to be an organizational API, a pathway to information and collaboration both inside and outside of the institution. The JHU OSPO has done this by sponsoring workshops, bringing in experts and licensing, community building, assessment, governance and project sustainability to help project teams to take the next step in their evolution. And also by working with a community center in Baltimore to help them discover how open source can benefit their work and the surrounding neighborhoods around the Hopkins campuses. The OSPO also actively builds open source software. At JHU, the OSPO is paired with the Digital Research and Creation Center which provides engineering resources to facilitate the creation and development of software to meet institutional needs, actively participating in open source development allows those in the OSPO to more easily relate to the needs of open source project teams and to better understand their needs and be prepared to provide help. And finally, the OSPO has taken an active role in teaching of open source methods by partnering with Stephen Wally of Microsoft as he teaches a course at Hopkins called open source software engineering also known as semesters of code where students learn how open source development is done and are required to participate in real world open source projects with mentors to guide their learning. Thank you. So as I've mentioned, Mike Nolan who's the associate director for the open work group or open RIT could not be here but he sent me some notes so I'm just going to read them for you. Firstly, as I'm sure it was discovered by many of our colleagues open source software development on campus developed by faculty, students and staff is not something that is easy to track or manage. The university is an environment where research and knowledge production happens chaotically, that's his word, not mine. Unlaunched work is being specifically funded no one registers their work and when they do tracking the licensing is not something that is done in a structured way. Many faculty, students and staff are generally interested in the virtue of sharing their work due to the perception of increased impact through sharing. However, most have little to no understanding of licensing requirements or the requirements and best practices of managing a community of contributors around their work. Furthermore, when it comes to utilizing contributions to open work in the process of tenure and promotion many committees evaluating tenure and promotion cases do not understand how to evaluate the impact of these contributions and often undervalue them because of this. Finally, the types of works produced across the university are many and often intersecting. Faculty will often produce data, code, writing and more as part of their research and each of these works face different types of collaboration. Furthermore, as a university office we provide services not just to the faculty doing research but to those teaching as well as students and staff and you can see in that slide that students own their own IP which is actually fairly typical if not universal in universities. In terms of accomplishments he says much of our accomplishments have focused on either in our direct assistance to open work communities or in the education and connecting of various stakeholders in the open work field. Primarily during our first two years of operation we provided direct assistance to faculty creating, maintaining or contributing to open works in the form of tailored consultation and direct assistance specifically for community development. This assistance involved developing community roadmaps, creating materials and documentation for assisting contribution and design feedback. As part of this assistance we contributed directly to various open source projects and programs such as the chaos community that's community health analytics for open source software. Through their values working group and Grimoire lab as well as the IEEE essay open platform. On top of direct contributions we promote education and dissemination of knowledge through various networks that we support. One such example is the open work in academia summit which RIT hosted in September that drew 80 speakers and attendees from government industry philanthropy and academia. Check out the page linked here in the slide for more information on that summit. We're continuing this work by developing asynchronous working groups to develop solutions to the issues discussed in the summit through our open work network. Finally, we made it a priority to continually disseminate our learnings and methods at various conferences, meetups and online communities such as the Linux Foundation events, FOSS backstage and sustain OS and plenty of others. And if you go to the open RIT website they have a lot of those resources available there. Daniel Shone who's the head of the Ospo at St. Louis University sent these notes that I'll read. There was an interest in open source and open scholarship and appetite help and assistance across the university. But the pace at which students work is different than the pace at which a full-time developer whether a researcher or software engineer works even when the students are given additional structure and support. A good project for our teams is usually something with well-defined outcomes and tasks that support research, developing software that itself is computer science or computer engineering research as possible but maybe not the best fit for the Ospo. Socializing a new program takes time even with enthusiastic support from key administrators. Everyone is busy. The initial focus was internal university constituents but the program quickly opened doors for many external collaborations. OS SLU's programs focus on developing research software overlaps and extends resources in our research computing group and OS SLU's programs initial approaches to software development agency overlaps with emerging professionalization of research software with organizations like the US Research Software Engineering Group. In terms of accomplishments, OS SLU started work this spring on a mobile app for ethnography field notes that is funded and they're additional funded and unfunded and partially funded development opportunities emerging leading towards a path to program sustainability. We realized that the unique nature of our teams means that we need to spend time on internal training and documents on how we work well. We have made our project solicitation and selection process clear to find our best fit projects. A listening tour with each department across the university is a slow but effective way to socialize our program with faculty. External partnerships with groups like launch code are available. A close relationship with our research computing group has been vital. There is an emerging community of interest around open scholarship and open data within our libraries and across our university that we've been able to tap into and advance. So finally I will come to Carnegie Mellon. You've heard this before, I was mentioning with Bill earlier that you will find their areas of overlap and then also differentiating aspects of what's happening in our hospitals which is maybe a healthy sign. Open source is everywhere and you might say well sure at Carnegie Mellon it's everywhere but I'll ask you this question is there software at your institution? And then I'll point out that depending on recent estimates and reports between 95 to 98% of all software either uses open source or is released as open source. So if there's software being produced at your university chances are there is open source software. But even at a place like Carnegie Mellon you don't know what you don't know. So a faculty member may know something about software engineering practices but they don't necessarily know about licenses. They may know something about teaching of the open source software but they don't know about research applications. So the OSPO sort of positions itself as being a consultant if you will around the whole aspect of open source software and it's rare to find any specific individual who knows all of those. There are very different social norms and a different ecosystem around software. Faculty are more willing to share their software than they are even share their data and once they give their articles to publishers share their articles. So the idea is that they are maybe more amenable to getting help even though you know they know a great deal about how to produce the software they don't necessarily know about community building they don't necessarily know about how to share it and sustain it. We heard this earlier that it's a key part of the overall open science program at Carnegie Mellon libraries and that Carnegie Mellon has a facility called Cloud Lab which has been discussed at previous CNIs and we're having explorations with that group about how to open up that infrastructure and those workflows. It is a key part of how people you know educate. So open source software projects as a laboratory the semesters of code project that Bill described and we found that it is a more seamless way to work with communities outside of Carnegie Mellon in a way that builds trust and transparency and we can talk more about that. I do need to point out that security is a major concern. We have the director of the cyber infrastructure and infrastructure security agency Jen Easterly speak at CMU last month and gave a talk on unsafe at any CPU speed. I encourage you to take a look at it. She does a great job of outlining these issues but how open source can play an important and digesting those issues. In terms of accomplishments we've hired a community manager. This is a person who's going to help build that community within Carnegie Mellon particularly with the students providing support for hackathons, internships and so on. I think these are the kinds of new roles that will come about as we start to explore open source more intentionally within universities. You've heard the importance of working with tech transfer. I'm glad to note that we have a very strong partnership with the tech transfer group with Carnegie Mellon. We just produced a guide for helping you select licenses and now we're thinking about whether that can be extended throughout universities. I talked about this cloud lab so it was created in the Bay Area to work with startups who don't wanna share their information with each other but we are now finding ways to open it up and open source software will play a key part of that. The semesters of code course that Bill had mentioned taught by Steven Microsoft, he's planning to teach that at Carnegie Mellon this summer and hopefully this fall as well. And Carnegie Mellon is also the home for the Software Engineering Institute. It is a federally funded research and development center that is the DoD's software arm, if you will. And they are very interested in security as you might imagine. So we've been working with them directly in terms of thinking about those issues. And you also heard about the chaos group. So Stephanie and I have agreed to co-chair this group that will look at metrics around open source software within the university contracts including how they relate to promotion and tenure. So there are many people working across all of our institutions and our institutions of providing support but there's no question that without this loan foundation funding this whole movement would not have started so we do wanna acknowledge that. And we do have some time for questions, comments and discussion so please we'll open it up to the floor and thank you for your attention. I'm not sure if this, oh yeah, I'm hoping the mic in the middle works so you can give a try. I see our excellent support person in the back is nodding so yes. Thank you. You all seem to have different administrative homes for your OSPO. After some experience could you tell us where you think it most likely should live at a new institution like mine? Oh hello. Yeah so that's actually one of the things when I was talking about being flexible. We originally assumed we were gonna be in the office of research but and part of that was because we had a very significant champion who was the vice chancellor of research at the time. He moved on and is now part of the office of the president at University of California. So there was a little bit of like, oh maybe there was a little bit of back and forth now. So we're not actually, right now we're actually sitting still in the school of engineering but ultimately even the dean from I think from the school of engineering was yeah, we see that this needs to be more campus wide and not school specific. So and I know a lot of there's different groups that will be here but I think we ultimately see ourselves being and for our campus being under the office of research but we're flexible about it. I'll add to that. So like mine exists in the library and the College of Engineering and Statistics. So like we're kind of in this another world that like the library is a good place in the sense that you cross all the colleges. You can go across that space but I mean like literally having just an annual review. One of my goals is to like actually write out like, hey this is a formal place where it should probably exist and I think some of that is in the office of research because like a lot of things we're gonna touch is consulting on research but it also comes to a point of like we're all funded I'm funded by Sloan entirely so like if I develop funding structures that like right now I'm not getting funded from the university so if I develop funding structures that don't require the university it doesn't entirely matter if I stay in the it's best to be in a place where I'm not in a specific college but outside of that if I can figure that out then it doesn't matter as much. Yeah I think what you've heard is that there's no one right answer. It depends on the institution and how the needs are best approached. Johns Hopkins it does sit within the libraries as well and that works well because the libraries is both a point of collaboration and a neutral space so where all of the schools feel confident that they can come and get resources from the library but also from a funding standpoint the library makes sense because it's able to build on the existing funding models that bring in the work from all the different schools to make things available in a central location. So it's probably clear what I think given that I've been involved with both Hopkins and CME Ospo and that's in the libraries. The other piece I'll add to this is the curation function so the idea of curating the research outputs and tying it to broader open science programs integrating it with data management services and so on but probably what's most important if you've caught across all these and I believe, well I know that RIT's program is in the vice president for research office and I believe St. Louis universities and computer science so what you're hearing in essence is who has the credibility to talk about open source software so naturally colleges of engineering and computer science and maybe libraries have that but where can you get a university campus wide service that is viewed as being neutral so that it doesn't end up feeling like this is this division's thing so I don't want anything to do with it. Carnegie Mellon has a school of computer science which has seven departments in it but even in the short time I've been there I've learned that if something goes into computer science it almost feels like, oh well it just went into the 800 pound gorilla and it's not for me so those are some of the issues I think you wanna explore. I am Matt Mernick from National Center for Atmospheric Research so I wanna pick up on I think Bill you mentioned when you were showing the charts about the diversity of open source software in general and we've definitely seen that in our organization looking at what's within our GitHub organization within our organization there's a variety of levels of maturity let's say it that way and software from very complete very kind of community oriented to just people throwing stuff up there on GitHub and it's their own individual software for their own purposes but it's still open source in some sense at least it's openly available. So my question is how do you kind of how do you work with different groups along this maturity level and sort of how do you approach also community building when you have this large diversity of sort of software building kind of models. So I think part of the expectation is that you're going to have different needs coming from different projects and some projects really aren't that interested in doing more than just saying they're good out there and saying have at it if you wanna touch it great but others are thinking a lot longer term they want to build community they want to engage with other institutions or others who are doing that software were outside of the institution that you're in or outside of the group that they're currently working in so it's really coming back to what is what are the goals of that group and helping them to take that next step forward because you're not going to be able to push them in a direction that they don't wanna go anyway so it's I guess we see the OSPO really as an engagement and a collaboration role where we can have a conversation and say okay these are the things that we see that you're doing where do you need help and maybe we can point out some things like have you thought about this and take that to the next level and then say okay this is where you are so continue that conversation and if they have specific questions and we can get those answered bring in people that know those things well then we can help in that regard as well. I think too that it's a really good question because it's something I really struggle with about like how to approach that there's kind of two ways to think about it one is pipeline so like teaching students to know what this looks when it's done well and that's something that educationally like creating courses or I mean honestly a lot of it I wanna do active projects where they're engaged with like real work in open source communities because you kinda learn when you're out there like oh I can't do this because like you can tell them but also they learn from experience and for students that makes a lot of sense they're willing they're there to learn they're willing to engage with that for other members inside of the university may not make as much sense a lot of the tech transfer stuff is kind of like it's more it's kind of like therapy it's like what do you actually want from this right so like if you have those conversations they kind of get that point of what does what are their goals what do they wanna achieve and then we sit there and say okay so if you wanna achieve this with open source and you want it to be at this level you need to do these kinds of things it requires this work to set that expectation realistically because like your point you can just put it out there doesn't mean it's gonna go anywhere doesn't mean anyone's gonna contribute to it and if you wanna create something that's actually healthy and competent like it requires actual work and the question is like do you have appetite for doing that work and if not like is there someone else that would take on that project to grow that community and that is like juggling in a university like who actually has capacity who has the time who has incentives to actually do that work and that's something that's always gonna be different any given day but I think it's a really important point of being like clear with someone in those spaces like what the work is if they wanna actually grow that at a higher level so they're not surprised and they don't feel tricked and be like hey there's a lot of things that are involved in this doing this right and then give them opportunities to learn those things and it's definitely like it's not dictatorial like you really have to work and identify and meet them where they need to be to make that work that way. Yeah I think I definitely second everything that's already been said and then we look at it also from a we have kind of a three pillar approach to how we've and that was a bit of a carryover from the research center from cross is that we focus on research translation and the research itself as well as the mentorship and education and so we have like different programs that focus on that and to deal I think to deal with a lot of the translation of one focus has been for us as being supporting those like who are like in a postdoc who have graduated and helping them kind of create communities around their organic around their around their project but also having them be what we call the ambassadors and help create kind of a community within the entire system so people have something to so others who maybe aren't necessarily part of one of our fellows will be able to look and see a model that they can follow and we can they help us to establish best practices for those in that level so that's kind of that you know that higher level like these are the project maintainers these are folks who are actually really do want to kind of continue their project and help create a community. We also have the research like we also have support for graduate students who are working whose research have kind of a plausible path towards an open source project and they're kind of we treat them differently because they're obviously working on research and their PhD students and they need to get their PhD so but they also we support them at a kind of a different level so I think it's kind of that idea of it depends on you know you kind of want to sit back and say well what do you need from us and help create a number of different options and then for students in particular for undergraduates we have a number of mentorship programs where we're like okay this is a great way of bringing and helping the pipeline helping create more talent in the open source communities in ways that are very positive so that people have good experiences when they when they come to an open source community which is a huge problem I think an open source in general that necessarily that first time that they work on open source sometimes isn't positive so we want to make sure our our undergraduate students feel welcomed and feel included within open source community in general but particularly within the ones in our that come out of the University of California and pose and pose right so yeah I was gonna say the pose project of course has been great I mean that's been a really useful way for us to kind of look at how to create an infrastructure and we kind of see it as being a great way of figuring out like what's something that how we can create some sort of sustainable method for all of our well for one project in particular one ecosystem in particular but how we can actually create a model that we can then use moving forward for other words so that's NSF pathway to open source ecosystem it's a grant that's funding developing ecosystem around a given open source project yeah yeah and we have we like I said we have one phase one project that's been it's been a great way for us to also see envision like a sustainable way to move forward and not just have projects that you know that don't they can't make that next leap because they don't have an infrastructure so that's been really helpful for us so I think one of the pathways for sustainability hospitals will to create services right and one of those services I think is curation so we have too much software actually we we don't need more and just to be quite blunt many of the things that are just put on GitHub don't really merit getting the kind of institutional support we're talking about here so that curation function I think is critical and one of the reasons I argue for the library being there for the hospitals there are existing services that you can build on right so there's python training our training at Carnegie Mellon libraries that's a great place to help people learn about get it's a great place to learn about dev ops practices and so on so I think of those services as a set of concentric circles right and in the core the types of things that many many many people need to learn the basics and I think libraries are really good at that and as you get further and further away to very specialized needs like the Pittsburgh Supercompeting Center where Carnegie Mellon has a lot of relationships I don't know that the office ever going to be able to support those kinds of specialized needs so it's a service you know sort of development effort but I think we can learn a lot from what we've done with data management services for example picking a choir so we are at time if someone has another question I won't speak for everyone I'm happy to stay but we can stay but if you need to leave of course that's totally fine too is there one more question that burning question people want to ask you're welcome to come up here afterwards as well yeah so just come on up so we'll call it there thank you