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2024 June OSS London Breakfast Club

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Sam Cunliffe edited this page Dec 17, 2025 · 1 revision

UCL OSPO possible goals (OSS London Breakfast club)

Hosted on June 27th, 2024 at the Alan Turing Institute with support from OSPO++, OFE and the Tools, Practices and Research Programme and The Turing Way team from ATI.

The ideas below were chaired by the following members of UCL/ARC Alessandro Felder (Sainsbury Wellcome Centre), Miguel Xochicale (UCL/WEISS), Mosè Giordano (UCL/ARC), Claire Ellul (UCL/Civil, Environ & Geomatic Eng) and David Pérez-Suárez (UCL/ARC) and provided by the following participants:

The discussions where separated into different themes to help find which goals, activities and policies this community thinks an OSPO on UCL could focus on. People moved between these themes through out the session to provide their insights.

Organisation

A university that promotes and support open source software is attractive to students and staff, helping therefore to increase its reputation. Its attractiveness to students is shown on how employable they will be by the industry, which they spent resources to form new employees on OSS practices [citation required]. It also helps to attract staff (on various areas) as they can see it has an impact in society. Moreover, some funding bodies are also requesting the software produced on research to be opened as part of their open science policies [citation required/examples].

Universities normally keep profiles of their staff, including their Open Source contributions to those, would help to increase connections of expertise, supporting sustainability and community interactions. Even when publishers or funding doesn't require include source code when doing Open science, the university could advocate for it. Contributing, for example, to Software Heritage.

The OSPO has to be built with policy where it focuses on collaborations as a central part of all, not only internally but with other universities, research institutions and industry. Helping therefore to create stronger ties. This will also ensure it doesn't depend on a single person or team and it continues. The tech transfer office (UCLB in UCL case) should be involved in this, they are not competing but complementing each other. The university could also collaborate with schools to promote open source within them (this could be fund through various digital up-skill programmes from government)

In UCL there are well established collaborations with London society. For example, The Barlett (e.g., resilience in London during COVID, or missions-driven government for public services in Camden with the IIPP). Working with them to include the OSS component will also have an impact.

OpenUK State of the Open 2023 mentions the UK Government had an open source procurement toolkit since 2011 (though withdrawn in 2014). These guides could help to promote the procurement of OS software within the university. Also, OpenUK is pushing to enable AI openness through their open manifesto, which an OSPO in UCL could also show its support.

There are funding opportunities for many of this activities. Some are: SLOAN, OSCARS, and collaborations with private sector.

What can we do right now?

  • Understand challenges from people already doing OSS at UCL
  • Collaborate with CHAOSS and other academic OSPOs (we need to get people involved)
  • Review what other academic and research institutions have done (build on existing work and avoid duplicating efforts)
  • OpenUK & sharing between unis for OSPO best practices
  • Look at the starts of EC OSS strategy (their first "analogue" steps, map of common challenges/tools)

Research

Challenges

  • Sustaining OSS projects when researchers change focus or run out of funds
  • Ownership (IP, Tech transfer office)
  • Balancing collaboration vs competition

Opportunities

  • CHAOSS collaboration for data about OSS projects
  • Releasing open data + content as digital public goods

Collaborations

  • Metrics (code quality, demographics of code)

What can we do right now?

  • OpenUK collaboration/visibility of research in UK
  • Networking strategies

Education

Goals / activities

  • Having OSS as part of the curriculum (teaching about things like GH and Security)
  • Promote students to contribute to OSS (through competitions? - have to be careful to set the right incentives though, some OSS contribution competitions have gone wrong in the past… like getting lots of one-line PRs that don't really help.)
  • Make / Re-use Open Source teaching materials (Open Educational Resources)
  • Teach "tech" people about OSS policies, licences, …
  • Teaching about "tragedy of commons" policies/procurement. Note that tragedy is a loaded term, so teaching should be more about understanding the economic realities/sustainability of open-source projects.
  • Teach non-tech (specifically policy roles) about OSS

Collaborations

  • thought leadership: Advertise courses to outside stakeholders
  • OpenUK - Could we coordinate something across UK universities
  • Institute of Innovation and Public purpose may be key collaborator within UCL
  • Linux Foundation Education (free courses / paid certificates)
  • Partner with /get sponsorship from (for e.g. a yearly workshop) finance firms to educate math/economy students about OS practices, law firms to educate law students about OS practices, Biotech firms to educate biology students about OS practices, etc…
  • teach about career opportunities in OS

Funding

  • From OSS focused grants orgs (Sloan, etc.)

What can we do right now?

  • Identify skills gaps
  • Survey of existing literature; research (LF research / OpenUK) resources
  • Offer work experience in OSS
  • Run summer of code
  • Get students to have GH and teach about GH contributions looking good on a CV

Community

Main question that arose

  • what communities to form?
  • need to focus/prioritise a list of communities
  • potentially the list includes
    • grad students
    • research teams
    • UCL leadership
    • ARC
    • academic staff
    • UCL Enterprise

Focus #1 - Training and Awareness

  • Raise awareness of what an OSPO is and - with the wider community - what is Open Source Software
  • Carpentries might be a way to start [CE: NB most students aren't aware that these exist!] - 'train the trainers' approach
  • How to maximise impact - concept of 'Carpentries for Impact'

Focus #2 - Looking outside UCL

  • Opportunity to link out beyond UCL to wider London OS community and get more researchers involved in this wider community
  • Also options via the Bluehats - > French public administration open source users - link bluehats with researchers

Focus #3 - Links to Existing Communities

  • build on existing work and avoid duplicating efforts
  • take advantage of existing networks
  • make a stakeholder map of existing communities and their overlaps
  • share resources across UCL departments but also across different universities

Focus #4 - High Level Support

  • Link to UCL Office of Open Science
  • Who is the most senior person in UCL who gets Open Source?
  • Need for high level ambassadors across UCL
  • need to lobby the leadership / provide evidence of the imporatance and impact of open source (see below)
  • Making the economic case for the OSP - ROI
  • Look at what UKRI are doing and lobby - Richard Gunn mentioned -will be in Sweden in September for X [event]

Focus #5 - Looking at best practice

  • Are there case studies from research papers
  • What are other universities doing - recommended examples include: UCLA, UC Santa Cruz - in particular with regards to innovation of open source and translation to society - involving communities and industry partners from the start of research
  • Sloan foundation - OSPOS - USA
  • Concept of UCL and UCLA twinning their OSPOs
  • Forge stronger links to companies where OS is valued

Focus #6 - Developing a community around individual software projects – how to guide developers

  • How to open source a project and build a community of developers that will work on this and sustain the project
  • What training is required
  • What is the value of people contributing to an open source project
  • Opportunity for projects to be added to the opensource.science list of open projects
  • Concept to have a 'for good' mapping on open source software - and maybe link to 'carpentries for good'

Specific sources of help

  • FinOS have done some work - can they help support us?

  • Forge stronger links between UCL students and the finance organisations that want to employ them - e.g. via an open source fellowship

    • Particularly focus on students with skills for and awareness of open source

  • Other projects to link to

Open Source Software Everywhere Else

  • Lobbing politicians -> Public money to public code
  • Direct tax payers money to support underpinning infrastructure software (e.g., matrix)
  • Support maintenance
  • Education about procurement of OSS (not buying licenses)
  • Have policy about software updates, fixes, consumption -> Inventory of where software is used, to be able to update quickly (e.g., security fixes)
  • know your community

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