This document defines the standardized audience personas used in the UC OSPO Education lesson inventory.
The following 10 canonical personas represent the primary audiences for open source education content:
- Beginners - Newcomers to open source with little to no prior experience
- PhD Students - Graduate students working on research and dissertations
- Postdocs - Postdoctoral researchers in academic settings
- Researchers - General research practitioners across disciplines
- Research Software Engineers (RSEs) - Specialists who write code for research
- Software Developers - Professional software engineers and developers
- Data Scientists - Practitioners focused on data analysis and modeling
- Community Managers - Those who build and maintain open source communities
- Maintainers - Project maintainers and core contributors
- Faculty - Academic faculty, PIs, and grant-seeking researchers
- Lessons can target multiple personas (comma-separated in Google Sheet)
- Use exact persona names as listed above
- Order personas from most to least relevant for each lesson
- Avoid creating new persona variations
See AUDIENCE_MAPPING.md for the complete mapping from previous audience values to canonical personas.
Last updated: January 2025 Related issue: #50