Abstract¶
The University of California’s network of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) launched in 2024 bringing together six campuses (UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego) to support open source research, promote sustainability, and establish best practices within academic environments. A key challenge in this effort is not only identifying open source projects across the UC system, but also understanding how these projects operate and engage with their communities. Despite UC’s significant contributions to open source, there is no centralized way to explore this activity, assess project health, or visualize adoption of open source best practices, making it difficult for researchers, institutions, and the broader community to engage with UC’s work. To address this gap, the UC OSPO Network is developing the UC Open Source Repository Browser (UC ORB), an interactive explorer that maps and visualizes UC’s open source activity. It surfaces key signals such as license usage, presence of community health files (e.g., README, LICENSE, CONTRIBUTING, CODE_OF_CONDUCT), contributor patterns, and repository metadata to provide a system wide view of how open source is practiced across UC campuses. This talk will explore the design and implementation of the UC ORB from collecting repository data via the GitHub API to translating raw metadata into meaningful visual metrics. In addition to the technical pipeline, we will share insights into the UC system’s open source landscape, highlighting trends like license usage, adoption of community health files.
Juanita Gomez | University of California, Santa Cruz¶
Juanita Gomez is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, where her research focuses on improving the security of scientific open-source software in collaboration with the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Juanita has extensive experience contributing to and supporting large open source projects, including her previous role as a core developer of the Spyder IDE at Quansight.
She is currently a community leader for the Scientific Python Project, where she helps coordinate and support the broader scientific Python ecosystem. In addition to her research and development work, she serves on the organizing committee of the SciPy Conference, is a co-chair of the Security Track at PyCon US and is a member of the NumFOCUS Security Committee.