 Good afternoon everyone. I think we're going to get started. I'm Said's chair there. I'm an associate dean in the University Libraries at Johns Hopkins I'm also leading the open source programs office there And I want to talk to you about university-based open source programs offices with Hopkins being maybe a potential model or a place to look for some inspiration So a couple of reasons why I think it's important that Hopkins can be a good role model in this regard one is The decentralized nature of the university. I'll explain what that means and the second is sort of the impact of the activity research activity at this institution If you ask anyone at the university whether it's decentralized, they'll tell you yes But I have a little bit of a game that I play with people Which is how decentralized is your university compared to mine? I'll give you one example. We have eight academic divisions at Johns Hopkins Now covid's changed a lot of things but prior to covid Across those eight divisions. Anyone want to guess how many academic calendars we had eight seems like a reasonable guess I heard higher and lower 24 Okay, so that has changed that that is a sign of how decentralized this institution is and Fundamentally what I mean is that a lot of the money and therefore the influence flows directly through the schools That's not always true in a university Many universities is the provost of the president's office that gets that first sort of access to control to the funds So I mentioned this because if you can make something work at Hopkins, you can probably make it work anywhere The second is the scope of the institution. So like many people many organizations We'd like to have rankings. We'd like to have classifications There is a so-called Carnegie classification of universities and the most research-intensive universities are so-called R1 Institutions and one of the things that they look at is the level of funding Hopkins has been number one for federal and private funding for I think 35 years in a row The most recent numbers are three billion dollars of funding that flows into the institution So it's a proxy for how much open-source activity may be happening within university I'm not saying we're number one in terms of how much open-source activity happens, but it's an important thing to keep in mind So when we're thinking about corporate auspose in university auspose I think there's a question about whether we can just take a corporate auspose and basically just say That's how you run a university. I Think if the answer to that question was yes This would be a very short boring talk So I want to talk to you about why that's not the case There was an earlier session today talking about auspose with Stormy Peters, Nithya Ruff and Dwayne O'Brien moderated by Don Foster and One of the questions that came up was about Non-profits and auspose starting in that context and I think the summation of that conversation was there are things We can learn from corporate auspose. Don't get me wrong But there are differences in terms of the culture the mission the profile Contributors in an organization like the university and these are just some of the key points to keep in mind That first point this is an actual conversation that I had recently with a computer science professor I was talking about the auspose and I've known him a long time and he said this is great. You should do this wonderful I said so you'd like to be involved. He said no I said why he said you don't understand when something starts to work It's no longer interesting to me so This is actually a mindset that exists throughout many departments and he's not trying to be flippant or facetious That's just true. He just doesn't care about taking something beyond his laboratory But there are many researchers who do But we have to keep in mind that that kind of exploration that's sort of maybe even Lack of results if you want to call it that way in a more productive kind of way is sometimes even celebrated within the university context Auspose deal with compliance for understandable reasons. We have very different Additional compliance issues to think about when it comes to things like medical data around HIPAA student data around FERPA Or how our funders have so-called public access compliance, which is disseminating the outputs from our grants the funding streams are very complicated and Not surprisingly if you follow the money as the expression goes You will understand universities have lots of different ways in which they get funding lots of different people have expectations around that And lots of outputs and results are influenced by that, but most importantly Governance in a university is complicated There really aren't too many people you can go to and say can you just tell the university to do this You can it's just not very successful or effective now There are laws and things that we obviously have to do that But something like an Ospo you'd be hard-pressed to find a person and say we're launching an Ospo Let's get everybody in line and work with that Ospo. It doesn't work that way There's a whole amount of persuasion Education awareness buy-in politics consensus you name it eight academic divisions a hospital system Defense laboratory All have very different missions all have different very different kinds of people working in them This is a really important point because we talk about Ospo's we talk about culture a great deal So the culture is very different in that sense We're having to start on an operational perspective with some very foundational kinds of things We don't know all the open-source activity that's being produced at Hopkins And I would submit a fit your university. That's probably true as well So you can do a search on GitHub for Johns Hopkins. You'll find a lot of results You can also do a search for JHU. You can do a search for JH You can do a search for Hopkins. You can do a search for the school divisions You can do a search for department labs. You can do a search for grants You can do a search for individual names. There's no naming convention. There's no hierarchy of those names For all I know people are naming things after their pets their kids. It doesn't matter nobody's telling you This is the way these things should be organized So it's kind of a great unknown and we're having to navigate through that and come up with basic things like how do you create an inventory? How do you understand who's doing what who's working with each other? Who is a contributor, right? Is it only people that are doing things in GitHub? What about students? What about people who define requirements in new and interesting ways? So we've got a set of resources tools approaches We're using right now and shout out to the Sloan Foundation for one of these It's a grant related to a false contributor fund While we're also trying to get people to use a GitHub enterprise account You may think big deal. We have a get-up enterprise account It is a big deal for a university to agree to have a get-up enterprise account decide who's going to run it and how it gets managed and then of course there's Students who are all over the place doing all sorts of things around open source. We're trying to corral them We're trying to find out who they are and work with them closely And finally we've been working with Viterja as well to try and understand who's actually producing open source software At the university and try to build a community around that in the context of open source software I want to talk about what we think of the three pillars of universities because they research education translation You know what research is. You know what education is Translation is really how does the research and education get used outside of the walls of the institution or beyond the boundaries of the institution So just go through each of these in turn. I'll start with research So one of the things that we've done at Hopkins is assert that research is a primary research object So fundamentally if you think about the outputs of a university from a scholarship perspective, it's articles data and software But a lot of attention on articles Lot of attention though not as much on data very little on software So it's kind of an untapped opportunity if you will So you can go to people and ask at the university do you care about open source? Maybe they will maybe they want you care about research. Everybody cares about research So casting open source software is a research optic is a very important way to activate the institution To get people involved to get people to care about this now This is fine. It's a good strategy But be careful when you go to researchers and start talking about research They expect a certain amount of credibility. This is a real conversation. I had Somebody was sorry. I was talking to somebody. He said well, you're from the library. You're not doing real research. I Said what constitutes real research in your opinion? He said you have to have a grant for the National Science Foundation I said I have multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. He said oh you do I said yes I said what's the largest grant you've gotten from NSF? He said seven hundred fifty thousand dollars He said what about you? I said ten million dollars He said let's talk So this is the kind of exchange you're going to encounter and he wasn't trying to be difficult or opposition or anything This is just the kind of way people talk in universities and my question to him was not trying to put him off or put him off balance or be obnoxious the Administrative mechanisms around a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar grant and a ten million dollar grant are completely different Orders of magnitude more complicated So if you're going to try and find a pathway to the open source software with that level of grant funding You have to have different strategies. So this is an important kind of element pattern if you will But be sure you've got people who can engage the faculty in that way on the education side We've been working with Steven Wally at Microsoft on something called semesters of code And this is as you might imagine somewhat a play on Google summer of code Big differences are it's a semester-long course, but it's not full-time So the number of hours is much less and we're picking projects that come out of Hopkins or a company in the case of Microsoft or the students themselves in the case of Semesterly so these projects here open Corvette is something funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Chan Zuckerberg initiative Public access submission system is something my team built to do compliance around public access The test is a project. I'll talk about in just a little bit and then you've got PowerShell for Microsoft so It's this interesting mix of projects. It's also the students are working directly with people from the project teams as mentors So as they learn about software engineering practices They actually have real-world software projects and the people working on them as mentors So this combination of coming together is really important. It's really critical to note a couple of things Yes, this is about training people, but it's not about certification. It's about accreditation What do I mean by that? So there is the accreditation board of engineering and technology and goes around and tells universities Yes, your degrees are accredited and that's really really important Hopkins is about to start this process in a year So this course is embedded in the curriculum of computer science It's the it's the chair of computer science who said yes This fits into the overall curriculum of computer science and that's a story We can tell a bit when they come around so it's really important to understand how these things are embedded in that context when it comes to translation typically the way universities have thought of this is technology transfer and That is a way that you can commercialize License the kind of outputs research outputs from university whether that results in patents or companies or pharmaceuticals or so on We are talking about and that's completely fine I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that and there are ways you can do that with open source as well But we're not asking what are the additional new ways of translating the outputs of the university, right? So one example is this public access submission system that my team worked on This is a platform that allows you to simultaneously deposit your article into multiple locations Either your institution or in platforms managed by funding agencies This is a really important part of being compliant with the public access policies that universities have There's interest. We're working with the National Institute of Health There's interest in the National Science Foundation and other agencies about extending this platform Across universities across funders. But one thing I heard loud and clear You can't have Hopkins run this platform for everyone. It doesn't work Why would Harvard and MIT use a platform run by Hopkins where you're getting access to the grants data? You're getting access to the the actual data in the publications So we've been working with the Eclipse Foundation and pass is becoming an official Eclipse product So it will be a third party if you will or any third party could run pass as a service So that the funding agencies are no longer dependent on one particular institution And something that's equally important I have a great team. I love this team and they do great work, but we are learning a lot in In terms of working with Eclipse and using their playbook for how software development is done We're having conversations about choices of technology and licenses and assumptions about software We didn't have before and I'm taking pass and offering it as an example for the rest of the institution Look where pass used to be look where it is after we work with Eclipse Would you like to do the same thing with your software? The other example of translation that I think is really important to mention is around the tests This is a an open-source platform developed by the city of Paris to deliver hundreds of digital services to the citizens of Paris And they have an interest in building a community of developers and a community of users And we've been working with them to extend Lutas to be used in a local neighborhood center a community center in West Baltimore called the St. Francis Neighborhood Center This center has built a physical lab, which will be a smart center And they have a digital strategy which of which Lutas is a key part of that So we're working with Paris. We're working with Lutas. Sorry with St. Francis Neighborhood Center and Obviously Hopkins on this platform If any of you have tried to sign an agreement in the university context Imagine trying to do that with the city in Europe The university in the US in Baltimore and a community center in Baltimore So I can tell who's from a university because you're nodding right now going No, I'm not doing that. That that kind of process is is just incredibly onerous Beautiful thing is we're using the open-source license It is a legal agreement. It is a description of the risk profile. It is a description of the IP So we're able to do the work without getting a grant Signing a MOU a data use agreement or a business associate agreement or all the other wonderful kinds of agreements Universities typically use to work with each other So it's just an incredibly frictionless way to start working with partners outside of the university and in this case, it's not about patents or Pharmaceuticals or spin-off companies. It's about social impact It's about actually working directly with the communities that want this kind of help and and having them as partners throughout this entire process And I talked about this idea of who's a contributor So one a group of students when they heard that we were doing this work One of the things we're hoping to do is use this platform to help homeless people find beds in the city in any given night a group of students went out and talked to a bunch of these neighborhood centers and came back to us and said You can't just ask about beds. You have to ask about whether they take kids Sadly, whether it's only for women Whether there are low beds where I can plug in a medical device Almost people have devices. So these are requirements, right? This is important in terms of working on the software. Those are contributions That they're not going to show up in the typical way. I think it's really important to acknowledge that identify and acknowledge that So these this this is a slide and actually as I looked at this, I realized I didn't put faculty on here It goes without saying but but I should have put faculty on here as well But this gives you this this sort of the range and diversity of roles of People I've spoken to over the last few months in order to make this happen And this is what I mean about the governance, right? It's every one of these roles and people multiple people in these roles have to be engaged had to be To be persuaded that this was something that's important to do It really isn't going to work in a university context unless you have all these different points of triangulation come together You may be able to address certain portions of course, but if you want that comprehensive view It's got to be this kind of conversation So I hope this gives you a sense that it's not that there aren't anything we can't learn in corporate auspose At this earlier session that I mentioned Dwayne O'Brien Very eloquently said you know their their best practices from corporate auspose that apply no matter what the context is But given the different mission the different culture of the different people that exist in university You can't just assume it's a one-to-one translation or mapping There are all these different kind of nuances that we have to pick up all these kind of realities of a university's work So that we can find that sweet spot in the middle of these two So I'll end by talking about auspose plus plus This is a community in the network that I've been working with since the beginning of launching the hospital Hopkins So in terms of timeline, I think it's important to mention We had an event in the city of Paris in June of 2019 and part of that was to talk about the work we might do around the tests Jacob Breen who's sitting right here came to me at Hopkins and said You should start an auspose at Hopkins and I remember my reaction, which was sounds like a great idea And I said what's an auspose? So I had to start learning about auspose. He helped me get in touch with a lot of people who helped me understand Where it is we announced this in Oskon in July of 2019 for It's the first time we mentioned the idea Then we had a series of events in September in Baltimore around open source where I gave a talk about my vision for how this would work and then we Jacob and Denise Cooper then talked about it all things open in October and then we went to Fauston in 29 in in February of 2020 where I had a tremendous opportunity to learn from lots of people You may remember something happened in March of 2020 that changed things Considerably and there have been lots of very important fallout from that But one of them was we stopped meeting right we couldn't talk to each other in person anymore We launched this group in response to that I was in the middle of a fellowship in my provost office around so-called open scholarship and I had started talking to him about this auspose and he kept saying at the end of June I expect you to make a recommendation or a report to me about what this means So I needed to keep learning and this community really helped make that happen but to DeWayne's point He says one of the most wonderful things about this community is how generous people are with our time and how we have one-on-one Conversations or two-on-one or three-on-one and so on. I Hope we can get back to that Osmo plus plus has been incredibly important in terms of launching the Osmo at Hopkins and I think it will continue to be But I also hope that at this session We can start to have more of those one-on-one conversations and more conversations with other people across the community And I hope that it doesn't end here Because I think we've done some interesting and important things at the Osmo at Hopkins, and I hope other universities can learn Just need to mention that there's a lot of open source activity that happened prior to the Osmo at Hopkins Brandeis RIT if you want to hear from Steven Jacobs right after this you see Santa Cruz And there are many that I don't even know or I'm not mentioning So I'm not in any way claiming Hopkins was the first on the map to think about it from sources of universities But this idea of creating these osmos, I think we do have a chance to make a movement here I hope we do that as a community And I'd like to start that with any questions you might have today. So thank you And I think we may have a couple minutes at least a question or two three minutes Eclipse Yeah So I'll repeat the question so it's recorded. So the question basically was what about pass why eclipse? And as the universities move forward with the source projects do we need another kind of foundation like that if I got that right? I Don't mean this to sound flippant eclipse because because they asked This is what I mean. We were having conversations. I Mentioned this they said we'd be interested in doing this, right? Is it the best foundation in the pure sense of the word? I don't know But this is where I'm getting at is you know, we asked some help and they gave it to us Osmo plus plus has asked for some help when we can get it. We'll take it if we can't we'll move forward This does seem a little bit somewhat Ad hoc to me So to the second part of your question It's a strategic question that whether these foundations can provide that kind of service that I think universities will need Or do we need something different? Universities are different And I will tell you working with clips has been great, but they're now getting a very healthy dose of this presentation And they're beginning to understand it's not the way they normally do things So I think it's a really important question asked But do we need some other kind of entity that can do this for universities in the way that these foundations have done a very good job With the corporate sector. I'm sorry. I don't know who's next Yeah, what's the potential for inter-university of collaboration? I think it's enormous Just that frictionless way working number one is a way to say we're interested in this and don't get me wrong We now have a grant for the work that I was talking about for the test So it's sort of backwards. We didn't write the grant and then go off and collaborate we collaborated and got the grant But I think if we're able to say we have you know Birds of a feather communities of interest, you know, like-minded people try and solve same kinds of problems without always having to write a Always have the right set of agreements. I think there's tremendous potential there. I'll give you one example We're in active conversations with Carnegie Mellon about semesters of code. They're very interested in doing something like this at Carnegie Mellon as well If you're interested in working with your community centers in your university and you'd like to organize around with tests or something else like that Why not? So I think we can be more driven by what problem are we trying to solve that requires scale and Then finding great people Maybe one more question No, I don't think it's ridiculous at all Hospital plus plus has been thinking about this in the government sector So that's another way that I think it could be extended, but I think you make a really good point I will tell you one of the first things the community center were working with said is It doesn't have to be just college students. We have K through 12, you know, maybe not K But you know nine through 12 or whatever they're precocious 8th graders 7th graders Whatever there are kids who want to learn about coding their kids who want to solve problems their kids who want to work with the Universities their kids who are trying to make an impression on a faculty number. So I do think there's a way Yeah, I think I think we're out of time. Is that correct? I thank you and I'm around so if you have questions