Open Source Program Office

UC Santa Cruz

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.

Featured

Carlos Maltzahn

Last updated on Aug 1, 2023 5 min read News

The urgent need to make the value of open source visible and quantifiable to university leadership

Earlier this year, Frank Wuerthwein, Director of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) mentioned to me a number: 32,000. That’s the estimated number of public GitHub repositories that UC San Diego faculty and students have contributed to.

Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn

Last updated on May 30, 2023 1 min read News

A Record 38 Contributors participating in OSRE '23

This year’s Open Source Research Experience is off to a fantastic start, with 38 contributors getting ready to work this summer on projects spanning open source hardware, software, and reproducibility in research and in teaching.

Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn

Last updated on Jul 7, 2023 2 min read education

2023 UCSC Open Source for Business

The OSPO UC Santa Cruz are pleased to be hosting the third Summer Seminar Series for our affiliated researchers, students and industry partners facilitated by Dr. Dirk Riehle, Professor of Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. The seminar entitled Open Source for Business consists of 12 lectures addressing everything you need to understand open source and to develop a corporate open source strategy.

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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

Led by Carlos Maltzahn and Stephanie Lieggi the OSPO is

Developing a “marketplace” of open source software projects across the UC system and associated national labs that brings mentors, students, sponsors, and open source stakeholders together
Establishing a postdoctoral “incubator fellowship” which will enable fellows to grow communities around their research prototypes
Organizing a yearly undergraduate “Open Source Research Experience”, a UC-wide mentor organization 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

Programs

Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn

Last updated on Mar 23, 2023 0 min read programs

🧪 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. OSRE 2023 introduces the Summer of Reproducibility.

Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn

Last updated on Mar 5, 2023 3 min read programs

🪺 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.

Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn

Last updated on Apr 20, 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

The urgent need to make the value of open source visible and quantifiable to university leadership

A Record 38 Contributors participating in OSRE ‘23

Sponsor Open Source Research Experience

Is your organization looking to better utilize open source and want to support projects that directly benefit your work? Does your company want to strengthen the talent pipeline able to work on technologies essential to your organization’s success?

Accepted as 2023 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

We are very excited to have been selected as a 2023 Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. The 2023 Open Source Research Experience and with it the 2023 Summer of Reproducibility will therefore benefit from GSOC’s world-wide outreach and generous funding of contributors.

AMA Session for 2023 Summer of Reproducibility and OSRE Mentors

Drop in and ask us questions about this summer program starting at 10:30am Pacific Time on January 26, 2023. Take a look at info about these programs on this website or watch one of the earlier videos. We will give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being a Summer of Reproducibility mentor, a joint program with the NSF-funded REPETO Project.

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