 So, today, I'm Steve Jacobs from RIT. Open at RIT is nominally the second academic kind of sort of open source programs office kind of knob. We'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. And we were funded by the Sloan Foundation, a big part of that funding was to help all of our faculty, whether they were in the sciences, the humanities or the arts, get support for building community around their open work. So I started off as an interactive media professor, then I moved to doing games in interactive media. So we created some of the first game design and development programs in the country. And in 2009, I spun up an honors seminar to make educational games for the Sloan Laptop per Child, which is where my entree into the open source world came from. And due to student demand, really, it grew significantly. We finished the first course as a seminar, offered it again as a formal course, had students from both of those courses saying, can we have another course? So built a projects course. And students say RIT is a cooperative education university for those who don't know what that means. That means that students must have X number of paid full-time internships before they get their diplomas. Straight A's, all classes done, no sheepskin until your co-op blocks are done. So they are required to do this stuff. They said, well, can we get a co-op to work on our project for a semester? And I had to find ways to bend the rules to make that happen. Once I did that, they started going to the new iterations of class one and class two to recruit people to work on their projects as part of their class project. So as a professor, you go, oh, gold. We have an ecosystem. And then the next thing after they wanted co-ops was, can you set up a minor? So we set up a minor. Through that minor, we also set up, once we did co-ops for their projects, we did co-ops for other people's projects. So they've worked with UNICEF Innovation doing both software engineering and community development with UNICEF Innovation. They worked with Penn International, which is part of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, to do a video chat program for the one laptop per child that would be biased to video, not audio, so that if you had network traffic, it would kill the audio first and the video second. They won a couple of awards for that. We worked with the Enable group, which was one of now several foundation efforts that are around building cheap 3D printed prosthetics for kids. So we set up a jobs program in one of our local charter high schools to have our students build a curriculum and create a summer course job program around doing that work, which they then absorbed into their curriculum. Overall, it became a year-round effort. Then we were hired by UNICEF Ventures to do community development for them, for with some of their venture teams. My assistant director, Mike Nolan, who is also sitting behind some of you and runs the student teams that help build the fellowship programs as part of that. And Mike's an alum of all of that work we discussed previously. He started as a student in some of the early open source courses. So now we have Open at RIT, which is a university open programs office. It's the second one in the US that was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. And it's split 50% in kind of trying to build the traditional Ospo-like efforts with our IT services department doing things like best practices, recommendations for contribution or for opening a project, trying to talk about policy, trying to engage them with some kind of compliance ecosystem, stuff like that. And then we also focus on open work, which is something that I started to use as a term. Because the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for example, put out a document that they said they wanted to see more open scholarship in universities. And then they had to say parentheses, which some people call open science or open research, and then the next sentence say, and of course, by the way, we also mean humanities, the arts, and the professions. So I then started to say, well, we're an open programs office, no source. Because at a university, we have lots of things that people do that are open. And we don't want people seeing us listed or hearing about us and say, I don't do code, they're not gonna wanna talk to me, I can't learn anything from them. So we took the word source out and we started talking about open work versus open science or open research or open scholarship because of those very kind of guardrails that get put up when you use that terminology, which is why Mason had to do all that explaining about what they really wanted to do. So you don't see the word source, but of course we support open source software, hardware, a whole laundry list of things. So Carson Wade in the back who's with Red Hat suggested that we build a formal definition of what open work is. And part of the reason we did that is because there's this whole list of things that happen at a university. Open access journals, open data, open design, open educational resource, open hardware, open innovation, open intellectual property, open research, open scholarship, it's open work. That way nobody has to worry about what discipline they're in and nobody has to worry about what they do, we wanna help all of those things. So, and part of the reason for that list and part of that reason for the engagement of the National Academies of Science Engineering in medicine, which is a bellwether organization that tries to influence academia as a whole. Once upon a time, there was free software, then there was open source software, then there was open science, kind of, right? Because as my university president asked me when we sat down to talk about this, he says, science has always been open, we're always supposed to reproduce our stuff and blah, blah, blah, and I say, yeah, but, right? This is about real process influenced by the internet. Every, the whole reason that everyone around the world is looking at my slides at real time is Tim Berners-Lee created this HTTPS thing specifically to accelerate the progress of science, especially pre-publication peer reviewed science. That he was working for Europe's Adam Smasher community and they wanted to be able to publish their results in a pre-print format, right? So in the academic world, you don't become real in theory until you have gotten your work peer reviewed and those results disseminated via a journal like Journal Nature that you hear about on NPR all the time or at a conference that's a formal scientific Congress from a formal scientific entity that's providing for dissemination of peer reviewed results of work. So the term open science and the people who practice it have these elements of their process that can include all of or just one or two of those things that we see there. Registering a research plan, right? So that's somebody saying, here, publicly announcing, before I start looking into this stuff, I want more eyes on this. Do I have, have I missed anything I should be looking at around my topic X, whether it's psychiatry or Adam smashing? Am I putting unconscious bias into how I'm studying this? Am I looking at people from other silos, other academic areas or other backgrounds? Look at what I'm doing and tell me is there something I'm missing there? And of course, the double-edged sword is what we're all used to when people talk about things in the open. It's like, but what if someone steals my idea, right? So you've got to get people down with that, right? The online distribution of pre-prints so that you have a much broader distribution network for saying, this hasn't been replicated yet, but there's some really interesting stuff here. Maybe you should look at it. Maybe you should try replicating it so it can get peer reviewed. Publishing and open access journals, science is open historically, but getting those peer reviewed journals published is a huge blockade. It's a huge bottleneck. It can take years, if not months, to get that stuff out there. It's a very flawed system, just like any human system is. The people who push against open science, open scholarship, open research say, oh, well, that can be gamed. And yet, you look at NIH and NSF and all of these other scientific organizations complaining about a reproducibility crisis. Because it's so easy to write papers with bogus data that looks good and put them out there and have other people cite what they're doing, because they haven't tried to reproduce your stuff. That there's lots of bad intentionally or unintentionally science happening. This is why you see the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health rebooting their open science, open data plans to try to be, once upon a time, they were like, oh, it's on a folder on the internet. And maybe somebody will find it and maybe you'll somebody try to reproduce it and just kind of put a link to your data. And now they're being much more specific and much more detailed about what those practices have to be and what safeguards you have to put in, which is upsetting folks. The publishing and open access journals is peer review without the major scientific publishers locking everything down, charging huge fees, blocking access to the information because the libraries have to pay skyrocket subscription costs to be able to have faculty and scientists and researchers access these articles and then sharing data openly. And then while there is some community manager work in very large scientific projects, there's not much and the open science community doesn't understand community in the sense that the open source community does and we all know that the open source community, there's the intentions to deliver and then there's the actual delivery of community. And there's a big gap there often and if we're not getting it right and we've been talking about it for 30 years, how can the scientists do better? Right? So when we were applying to the Sloan Foundation for funding, they looked at those co-op programs we had set up where we were hiring interns to work for NGOs to help them build open community around their work. And I said, what looks interesting in the work that we do? And Josh Greenberg said, well, why don't you do for your faculty what you're doing for UNICEF? Why don't you help them get their work out there? Why don't you teach them about building community? Why don't you help jump-start what they do? And one of the things both Sloan and I were interested in was going to grants against the kind of common practice of mini-grants for research within a university structure. Generally, faculty can apply for a mini-grant that often has a title like a President's Innovation Award or a Provost Research or something like this, right? You submit your mini-grant proposal and you get between five and ten K to hire one or two students to do something. Most often it's to write code for you or to upgrade your website, right? Very delimited in what you can get from one student and very tough in this kind of like blockstep of do it in one year or one semester, sorry. As a result, academic open-source often has a bad reputation. Often it's done by PhD students and once they've got their sheepskin and are on to their day job, they're done. Often they're not well trained in documenting work or leaving it for someone else to pick it up. There is a vast graveyard of our modules that have been developed by PhD students that fall off the face of the earth once they graduate, so it's not great. So the fellowship model that we have is rather than providing people a mini-grant award, right? And we see this kind of the same kind of stuff here, right? I mean, and this is not a knock in any way, shape or form against the open-source contributors fund model that was kind of led by Dwayne indeed. And it's been replicated in other places and has been adopted or at least trialed by Johns Hopkins as part of their efforts. Which is again a kind of, it's an automated system to transparently have a community vote to award one person x grand to get a thing done, whether it's to go to a conference or hire a grad student for x number of months or whatever. It's probably works better in open source organizations because they're better leveraged than actually the individual faculty members to really take advantage of that. They have a long term store of work done, work needs to be done. There's a paper trail. So it happens in both places. But it probably doesn't succeed as well in academia. So we offer a service of multiple students to accomplish a set of tasks or task for a faculty member. And that's not locked in by it must be for one semester. In most cases, we get it done in less than one semester depending on what the work is. Sometimes it spills over into more than one semester, but it's about accomplishing the goal. Most of the requests we've gotten have been faculty members who want to move from consumers to contributors. Often that happens under a semester. Hey, I've got this body of work and these guys really call for contributions and I'd love to get my work into their repositories and their collections of information or help them with their process, but they don't know how to do that. So we work with them, we do some of that work for them and then we train them on how to keep doing that after we leave. A lot of it is with either researchers or faculty members who have stuff that they want to open and build a community around or they have work that's been opened for a very long time and their community pipeline and all their materials, etc. They need a reboot or they need to be scaled up. Depending on what that need is, that's less or sometimes slops into another semester and it means things like doing community member analysis. Who's really using your stuff? Who's really a maintainer? Who really uses your stuff that wants to contribute? What kind of blockers are there from somebody moving from one to the other? How complicated is it? So we'll kind of do a community architecture analysis with them. We'll interview some of their maintainers. We'll interview some of their users, try to build a better pipeline. If they need it, try to set up governance. If they need it, if it's their first website or website that needs rebooting, we'll do UI or UX work. That type of stuff is what they get in a fellowship from us. So they don't get cash, they get services to accomplish a goal. The projects that we supported RIT are myriad. So we worked with Vitas Pathways, which is genetic data and bioscience around making better vineyards. DS for All is a data science curriculum that actually began as a partnership between IBM and Duke. And since you don't have to originate the work to participate in our program, they saw what we were doing with our faculty and said, hey, can you help our faculty? I said, I can't work for your faculty, but I can introduce my faculty and data science to your project. And if they wanna contribute to that, that's how we can serve the greater good by working with them to work with you, and that's what we're doing now. I have a software engineering professor who has the Vulnerability History Project, which is a museum of mistakes. And this is something that he's worked on for years that is open source in that generally his students work on it. And the IP is licensed openly, and some of them will contribute to it after they leave, he has a couple of people in DARPA and other places that like it. But he needs to do the big push to really build a larger community. So we're again doing that kind of, who are your users, what are your pathways with your pipeline to try to help him grow that base. We worked with a English professor who did a book on Victorian autobiography. And people in that field said, we wanna see all your data. Yes, some of that's in the book, but the book's a subset, like where's all the juicy stuff? So how can we take that database that he has that he wrote the book from, get it out there to the researchers? And they gave it my favorite name, which is the Victorian Autobiographical Information Network, or Vane, which is a fabulous acronym for information about autobiographies. Made me very happy, as soon as I saw the name of the project, I looked at Mike and I said, we gotta do this one. So that was fun. A research project that I helped kick off before the open programs office opened is something called World Around You, which is work with the folks who run the master's degree in deaf education at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is a college of RIT, if you're familiar with Gallaudet University, which is like the four-year Abraham Lincoln created college for liberal arts primarily for deaf students. NTID is the Johnson administration created two-year tech school. And then students who get their two-year degrees from NTID can pass into a number of RIT four-year degrees, you know, with no blockers, no bridge courses, anything they just transition in. A bunch of kids who will come straight to RIT for the four-year program can get support services from NTID. Their education degree, one of the problems that deaf educators face is that deaf kids' parents and their teachers rarely sign and or are rarely native in the sign language they teach in. If you know anything about people who have children or you have nieces, you have whatever, right? What you hear all the time is, read to your kids, read to your kids, language development, read to your kids. Before they can even speak, read to your kids. Nobody reads to deaf kids in sign language, right? And so there's a huge literacy lag. Then they get to school, the sign language that they get taught in most often because there's 300 years of history of deaf educators voting down the use of sign language, only bringing it back into the classroom in the 60s. The US was the leader of that. And often you will find that school systems like the Philippines or in India, where if there are hundreds or thousands of languages that have spoken dialects, right? There is a boatload of native sign languages as well, right? The Philippines is a vast sea of separated islands. So are there individual languages that pop up? Up until they passed a law that every child needs to be taught in their native language, the deaf kids were all getting taught in American sign language because we led the charge, and that's what all the materials are in. And it's hardly that they're the only country where ASL is the primary instructional language. So this thing is an open collection of deaf storybooks created by deaf people, where you can pick often multiple different signed languages and textural languages, and you can juxtapose them and watch them and get tutorial games, right? So we're trying to build an open community. They already have open content. They need an open tech community. So we're working with them to get that done. Test Smells is another software engineering project that's automated bug detection and ideally automated bug repair for a lot of common software problems. So we're working with them to build them a community. So you can see a really wide range of stuff. Again, why it's not just an open source, right? We're doing websites on the history of redlining in the Western New York region with the liberal arts community. There's just lots and lots of really cool projects. Surprisingly, the National Science Foundation has caught up. I did not find this solicitation first. In fact, my vice president of research found the solicitation first. And he wrote to me and said, did you write this for them? Because this is the first time that the NSF has funded governance and community growth for open source work. There's a two phase program. There's a smaller phase program, the 300,000 for one year. The first opportunity to submit to that has already passed, but this will be a multi-year thing, to just figure out what you need to do to build a community. Phase two, 1.5 million for up to two years to not only figure out what you need to do but to execute. And very little, if any, software development can be funded as part of this. It's all about community development. The only software development you can fund is if you need to fix your pipeline or your tooling or you don't have any community back end and you need to build one to help you recruit. Otherwise, it's all this other stuff. Karsten, is that a question? Yeah, I can take it now. So Karsten's statement slash question is he's concerned over the fact that in open source software at least, community and technology are intertwined. And he's concerned about how restrictive is that don't code thing. The answer is I don't think they knowed. It's the first time they're doing this but what they're trying to say is no, this is not so you can build release 2.0, right? If you're gonna ask for technology development as part of your budget, you have to defend why you need it to support your governance, your outreach, et cetera, et cetera. So if you can make the case for it, you're good. But it's not about putting new features into your existing product. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a big step. There are lots of us who have one leg in the academic community and one leg in the open source community go like, thank you, oh, it's taken so long, right? So has our fellowship been successful? What comes next? Okay, success is hard to judge because what we're really doing is we're giving them the tools and the setup and the knowledge to grow communities of their own. We're introducing them to the concept of community management but they're not contracting us for community management, right? That's not the initial engagement. So we get them started, give them that roadmap and that startup but then they have to do the work obviously. As you all know, community growth takes time too. So it's hard to judge but two of our early indicators is that faculty came to us and say, hey, we wanted to make contributions to this thing and they did it. So success number one. Success point number two is that three projects that have gone through the fellowship program have come to us to ask for help in writing their proposals for this pose program for the phase twos ago in October. And what comes next is after we've burned through the two years of funded support, the goal is the process is already in place to work with the office of sponsored research, the foundation's office to start communicating to folks that anything you apply for now from anybody, private philanthropies, state, federal, some level of public availability or open community or open access to your work, it's got to be there and it can't just be it's in this folder at this link anymore. It's not good enough. So that we're available to help people work on the language for those proposals and if they don't want or don't know how to or want to get trained in so they can do community work themselves, they can write us in to their budgets. Faculty often have to put in or anybody who applies for grant has to put in what's your sustainability plan. How does this continue after we've given you the money? Well, building a really strong open source community is one way to do that and they can work with us where we already have a track record in helping people do that to get that work done. People who write proposals whether they're scientific proposals or public service proposals often have to say a percentage of our fee or this piece of our grant money goes into an external assessment of the program when we're done or as we're doing it. So this is a similar type of thing, write us in at the front end to help you get your dissemination done right. So we'll see if we're successful or not but that would be how we would move this forward past the initial grant funding. And part of this is about, part of what Open at RIT is doing to support the fellows and support our faculty in general is that right now both industry and academia are facing similar challenges in terms of demonstrating value, efficacy, impact, translation and their open work. If you are Google or Amazon or Facebook you are probably giving people 20% time to work on stuff or you're hiring. This piece of software is crucial to our stack and we hire three people full-time to work on that piece of open software to make sure it stays alive and maybe we get a little influence into how it goes, right, that happens. And they know that but they're having trouble figuring out ROI, KPI, demonstrable spreadsheet here. And it's even harder when it's not software engineering work you can generate automatically metrics on but when it's, well, you know, Bob's been the community manager. Well, what the heck does that mean and what did Bob being the community manager for the thing that keeps our software working for the world? How do we really, you know, prove that that was a good thing? It's not transparent. It's not something we can automate. There's no metrics on it. Sally does the docs and somebody else does this and somebody else does that. Where's the ROI and the KPI that we can tie to that effort? How does that work? On the academic side, right, we have the issue of it's not a peer-reviewed journal article. Professor So-and-so runs the community for the Adam Smashers that do this critical research work and journal nature doesn't care about his community work. They're not gonna publish a peer-reviewed article on it. So how do we promote him? How do we evaluate him? How do we give him tenure? If he doesn't have the stuff we're used to looking, we're used to looking for. Our colleagues in Europe, some of them have told me that in some of the European countries, the classic peer-reviewed journal, peer-reviewed conference is so hard-baked and because in many countries outside of the US, the university system is driven by government policy and government systems, they won't do open work because it's a detriment to them. It takes away time from writing their articles. So why would they do this when it's not gonna get them promoted or it's not gonna get them a raise or what have you, right? So we're seeing a lot of things happening kind of sort of at the same time in industry where we have people like Amanda Kasari at Google saying, we have these credit taxonomies to try to surface that less visible or invisible effort to the enterprise as we're trying to do that same thing in academia. There are other kind of common pain points, if not problems or if not blockers and they're talking about these things but in different ways and they don't know in most cases that each other exists or they're having the same problems. So our good friends at the Alphabet Sloan Foundation gave us a little seed money and we are running something called the Summit on Open Work in Academia, September 7th through 9th at RIT. And you can find the link to that there. I have paperwork for those, little pieces of paper for those of you who are in the physical space and you can see we have a pretty big list of speakers from both the open source world, the academic world, from some of the associations that work in either industry or academia around open work like Open UK or Invest in Open Architecture or the Open Funders Research Group. We're trying to get all of these folks together for one day, the first day and just have panel after panel. So people from each side of the aisle, as you will, can talk about those common problems and pain points and understand where the overlaps are. The second day after a couple of opening presentations, most of the day is breakout rooms to have people get down, start talking through these things together, have a moderator there to take notes and we're gonna do two of those across Thursday. We'll have a break in the middle where Brian Alexander who runs the Future Trends Forum which is a group of futurists who focus mainly on academia and have done some stuff on Open before. He's gonna stream his weekly webcast from the summit so we get our attendees and our presenters to talk to his audience of folks that usually come to that. And Friday morning we'll do report outs and figure out what happens next? How do we continue this work? And with that, that's what we've been doing at Open at RIT. That's how our fellowship programs work. We've got, I don't know, six or 10 minutes for Q and A and ask away. Comments are all so good, didn't have to be a question, sir. So how do we hire your students? Do you have a jobs program? The answer is absolutely yes. As I said, RIT is a co-op university. So there's an office of co-op and placement, I think. Let's see what we get up. So cooperative education at RIT. So this website will talk to you about how you post a need for jobs or a search for interns. That program office services students who are in school looking for their co-op jobs. It services students who are graduating who are looking for their first full-time job. And it gets a lot of traffic from our alums who are when they're ready to look for their next career will not only look at Monster or Indeed, but they'll look at our board because we will post those positions for full-time early career versus recent grad-type positions as well. And they are more than happy to work with you. So very good team. Other comments, questions, thoughts? Do we have anything from the chat room, folks in the back? Nope, we have a very quiet chat room. Carson. Okay, so I'm gonna condense Carson's question down to what does a community for open science look like or what does it do or what does a community manager do? Much of it is the same as an open source, right? Being the hub, being the point, dealing with goals and milestones as scientific research has. That's some of those goals and milestones and roadmaps are about getting this work disseminated, getting other people to use it. How do we make sure that people are able to use our data? How can we get more people replicating our work or trying to replicate our work? So you will find if you type in open science community manager, there will be handful of articles, handful of posts, not a lot. A lot of the frenzy around NIH's new data management requirements, right? You have to have your data model, your dissemination of your data, your maintenance of your data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You've gotta have that model locked for your initial proposal at this point, right? What are the data types? What are their sizes? All that stuff, right? And sort of the uproar around NIH putting this out is that there's a role out there in the scientific world that's a data manager that does this data planning, that does sit on top of this data pool. So community manager might have that kind of role. A lot of the scientific community's kind of concerned about this new level of detail that you have to have at the get go and be able to implement at the get go is they don't have people trained to do it. There aren't enough people trained to do it. What's gonna happen? Well, the last hired, the recent grad or graduate student next, if there's not funding or a mechanism within a university of probably these services, it's getting dumped on the newbie faculty who already has to do everything or we're back to grad students and then do we run into the graveyard of our projects all over again, right? Are they really qualified to do the work? So that's one of the big concerns. I did am, there's a website called The Conversation and if you search for my name in The Conversation, Steven with the Ph. Jacobs, so far I've written one, count them one article for them but it's about what the NIH policy is, links to it, what they're required to do and why it makes people nervous. You can get more detail on that and I have one minute left so if it's quick Carson. Right, so Carson has had a big light bulb go on about people who like open community work in open source but don't wanna be part of the larger corporate infrastructure. Here's a whole new place that he's never thought of where he could point people to look for jobs like that. Fairly restated, okay and with that I think I'm done. So feel free to search on open at RIT and summit if you wanna learn more about the summit. My email I think is linked certainly on our website which is in the slides and maybe even in the slides don't hesitate to get in touch. S-J-A-M-A-I-L-dot-R-I-T-dot-E-D-U. Not too hard to remember. Thank you for your time.