Image courtesy of firmbee.com via Unsplash
The UC OSPO Network is thrilled to announce that our survey, “Challenges and Opportunities in Open Source”, is underway. Led by a research team at UC Santa Barbara and encompassing all campuses in the network, the survey will inform activities across the UC system. The survey is being actively distributed at the six campuses currently represented in the network, but it is open to responses from anyone at a UC campus engaged in contributing to open source, whether as a maintainer, engineer, issue reporter, document developer, community manager or another role associated with open source software. This survey will help academic OSPOs prioritize among the many ways that they can serve their communities, providing targeted services with maximum benefit.
Uncovering challenges and opportunities#
We developed this survey to identify areas of greatest need for open-source support. The core questions focus on challenges open source contributors have faced and the potential solutions they might find most useful. When combined with biographical information such as position type, the responses will highlight where support is most needed overall, and reveal differences between groups—for example, faculty versus postdocs or maintainers versus occasional contributors. Additionally, a free-text response box invites participants to describe further challenges or solutions, which we will use to uncover additional opportunities.
Integrating repository data#
We will also leverage the survey to explore repository characteristics and to develop an understanding of UC open source practices. For instance, what licenses are people using, if any? Are repositories including a README or “How to cite” instructions? To support answering these questions, we’re asking survey participants who feel comfortable sharing their repository information to provide their GitHub (or GitLab, BitBucket, etc.) usernames. We can then manually analyze this sample of repositories, in combination with others revealed through work at UC Santa Cruz, to identify common practices and potential challenges. These insights will then inform a larger-scale study where we apply machine learning techniques to analyze repository metadata across a broader set of publicly available UC repositories—always in aggregate and with sensitivity to privacy.
Reproducibility and looking ahead#
The survey was designed by the UC OSPO Network team at UCSB, with input from members across the network as well as colleagues outside of UC. Our goal is to create a survey instrument that we can implement annually and that other universities can repurpose and reproduce. To that end, a PDF of the survey instrument is available upon request and once the study is published, the survey instrument and anonymized data will be shared in accessible formats.
We look forward to sharing the insights gained from this survey and applying them to strengthen open-source practices across the UC system. We are deeply grateful to our survey respondents for contributing their valuable perspectives. Together, we’re building a more effective and supportive open source community within academia.
For questions or comments about the survey, or to receive a link to take the survey, please email ospo@library.ucsb.edu. The survey will be open until May 2, 2025.