The UC OSPO Network recognizes the critical role of open-source software (OSS) in modern research and education. As researchers increasingly rely on and contribute to OSS, its sustainability has become paramount for the entire scientific community. This issue resonates across all UC campuses, prompting our project team to address the challenges of OSS maintenance and develop strategies to overcome them. We aim to establish best practices for the UC system—which can serve as a model for other large university systems—focusing on building robust community architectures, increasing adoption, and enhancing project security. By tackling these key areas, we strive to ensure the long-term viability and impact of open-source projects originating from and utilized within the UC system.
We are collecting best practices addressing community building and management, project documentation, software security and open source project governance from well-established open source foundations, white papers, reports and peer-reviewed publications. The collection will be shared as a Zotero library. We are also experimenting with NotebookLM to provide an interface to query the library directly. Currently, it is limited to 50 documents, so we will have to assess our approach as the collection grows. Building on our work consolidating best practices and through consultations with the campus community, we will develop best practices for the UC OSS practitioners. This work will include case-studies from within the UC system and contributions from technology transfer offices.
Community is at the heart of open-source software development and sustainability. UC researchers both use and produce OSS as a critical part of research and teaching. We are working to connect those researchers on and between the different campuses. A community manager will coordinate virtual and in-person thematic meetings in an effort to create collaborations between groups with similar interests and approaches.
This work builds on Professor Filkov’s work of predicting the graduation of projects from the Apache and Eclipse incubators based on socio-technical factors. The tool will determine the progress of projects towards sustainability based on an evaluation of the communication and development activity that occurs in the repository.
Open-source software is often created to accomplish a research goal. We want to guarantee stability for tools created or used by UC researchers and instructors for a duration of five years. The goal is to enable the reuse of the tool for a predictable amount of time, while giving its creators time to build community around the tool to sustain it.