Open Source Program Office

Open Source Program Office

UC Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

🏠 Welcome!

Today’s universe of open source communities has immense potential to amplify the impact of scientific research. Thanks to a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the OSPO UC Santa Cruz is being established to provide a center of gravity that brings together everything needed to unlock that potential.

The OSPO’s mission is to create partnerships with stakeholders within and outside the UC system to promote open source literacy and best practices, helping students learn from open source communities, letting scientists use open source to accelerate research efforts, and connecting students and scientists with sponsors from industry, government, and foundations.

Through a number of continually refined programs that are designed to amplify impact of the UC research enterprise the OSPO is building a community of practitioners who aim to create and share knowledge, collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source research efforts.

Read more about the OSPO.

🔭 About

The 1-Minute Pitch

About

Open source research efforts within the University of California face many challenges, including

  • Educating students to be productive in open source projects
  • Revealing the value of open source to the UC system
  • Broadening engagement with industry, government, and foundations

The UCSC OSPO effort was founded by Carlos Maltzahn and Stephanie Lieggi in 2022 under an Alfred P Sloan Foundation Grant. The effort continues under the leadership of Lieggi and Faculty Director James Davis, along with OSPO incubator fellow Emily Lovell. The UCSC OSPO team, along with partners at other UC campuses, is

  • Developing a community of practice of open source software projects across the UC system and associated national labs that brings mentors, students, sponsors, and open source stakeholders together
  • Establishing infrastructure and opportunities for researchers to grow communities around their open source projects
  • Organizing a yearly undergraduate Open Source Research Experience, a UC-wide mentorship program that works with Google Summer of Code and other global outreach efforts and engages with industry, government, and foundation sponsorships
  • Creating partnerships with innovative open source teaching initiatives inside and outside the UC system

The UCSC OSPO mission is to leverage open source to expand the reach and impact of research coming from throughout the UC system.

📺 Programs

Last updated on Oct 17, 2023 0 min read programs
🧪 Open Source Research Experience
🧪 Open Source Research Experience

The Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) program by the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) UC Santa Cruz provides support for undergraduate and graduate students contributing to open source research efforts. The goal of the program is to seed contributor communities of open source research efforts and to help make computational research efforts reproducible. With this program the OSPO participates as mentor organization in Google Summer of Code and other outreach and sponsorship programs. The OSRE 2023 introduced the Summer of Reproducibility (2023, 2024).

Last updated on Oct 3, 2023 3 min read programs
🪺 Open Source Incubator Fellowship
🪺 Open Source Incubator Fellowship

This program supports the work of postdoctoral scholars aiming to create and grow productive open source contributor communities around innovative research prototypes in order to amplify the impact of their research. To be considered for this program, a postdoctoral scholar should have a research prototype with significant open source software or hardware infrastructure and a UC Santa Cruz-based faculty mentor.

Last updated on Oct 3, 2023 0 min read programs
🎓 Open Source Education

The OSPO supports the creation of course work at UCSC that aims to increase the pool of students skilled in working in the context of large open source software communities. Students of these cources find excellent mentors in academia and industry and often become successful open source contributors. The OSPO also hosts guest lecturers on topics specific to open source, including a yearly workshop series on open source.

📝 Blog

SoR 2025 Mentor Info Session
Could your reproducibility-related research project benefit from working with enthusiastic and talented students who are paid to productively contribute to your work this coming Summer? Would you be able to mentor that student no more than 5 hours per week? The Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) Program is the opportunity you are looking for to move your research forward.
UC Network Joins UN OSPOs For Good to Enhance Global Collaboration on Sustainability Goals
Representatives from the UC OSPO Network were among those invited to attend the Second Annual OSPO for Good discusions at the UN Headquarters in New York.
UC Network Joins UN OSPOs For Good to Enhance Global Collaboration on Sustainability Goals
UC OSPO Network Launched
With funding from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the UCSC OSPO is leading a six campus effort to institutionalize the OSPO approach throughout the UC System.
UC OSPO Network Launched
40 Contributors participating in OSRE ‘24
Summer 2024 OSRE supporting 40 students working on Open Source and Reproductivity Thanks to the support from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the National Science Foundation FAIROS RCN program, the UCSC OSPO has matched 40 students with mentors to contribute to open source and reproducibility this year.
40 Contributors participating in OSRE '24
Accepted as 2024 GSoC Mentor Organiztion
We are excited to have once again been selected as a Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. The 2024 Open Source Research Experience (and with it the 2024 Summer of Reproducibility ) will once again benefit from GSOC’s world-wide outreach and generous funding of contributors.
Accepted as 2024 GSoC Mentor Organiztion
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