CSCCE has received funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with Karthik Ram at the University of California, Berkeley to create and deliver a training program for grantees of NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program. The program will run in 2023 and 2024 and be offered to all POSE awardee teams to help them create sustainable, community-centric ecosystems around their open source projects.
In addition to working closely with POSE program officers, we’re thrilled to continue collaborating with Karthik Ram and the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) to design and deliver this new training series.
We are now embarking on a detailed planning phase, with training scheduled to begin in the early spring of 2023. In this blog post, we offer an overview of the scope of the program, highlighting four new employment opportunities with CSCCE and URSSI.
Training for NSF POSE grantees
The overarching goal of the new grant is to create a robust training and peer support system for leaders in open source. As a first step towards this, CSCCE’s training team will be working with NSF and URSSI staff to devise a multi-week training curriculum that supports grantees in creating secure and sustainable Open-Source Ecosystems (OSE)*.
“We’re thrilled to be supporting such an essential effort that recognizes the importance of the human factors such as governance and volunteer engagement that affect open source project sustainability. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with long-time collaborator, Karthik Ram, who brings essential open source expertise that will help us deliver this valuable new program.”
CSCCE’s Director and co-PI on the grant, Lou Woodley
We’ll be working closely with experts in OSE maintenance and evolution as we deliver the training, creating case studies of successful OSEs and providing coaching opportunities for learners. We’ll also be adapting some of our existing CSCCE frameworks and teachings from Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals to highlight the importance of human interaction and community building in OSE development.
*An OSE is a sustainable organization that enables the ongoing, collaborative, asynchronous development of an open-source product, such as data, software, and hardware, that is designed to be publicly accessible, modifiable, and distributable by anyone under an open-source licensing model.
Building a community of practice for OSE leaders
As we deliver our customized training modules, we’ll also be building a community of practice for learners, using our experience of running CSCCE’s Slack-based community of practice as a model. Our intention is to connect OSE leaders to create a learning community for collaborative OSE development.
We’ll also be coordinating the first of what we hope will become an annual unconference for POSE grantees and others interested in the sustainability of open source projects, ensuring learners have multiple ways to connect and learn together.
“In working closely with open-source projects over the past two decades, we’ve learned that sustaining the outputs beyond the initial runway has been a big concern for project leaders. We’re very excited for this unique opportunity to bring together leaders from not just open source software, but also from the open hardware and open data communities.”
Karthik Ram, director of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute and PI of this grant
Sharing resources with the broader community
Developing this new program will result in new supporting materials that will be useful to the broader open source community, and we intend to make those resources openly available. This will include case studies of existing, successful projects, recordings of talks from experts, and other artifacts, such as a glossary of terms.
New opportunities to work with us
The scale of this program means that we will be hiring three new staff members to join the CSCCE team: A lead trainer with expertise in the open source space, a project manager to work on coordinating the smooth delivery of this program, and a director of technology and operations to manage the various platforms, processes and business relationships that we’ll be implementing for both this and our nascent certification program.
“This is a really exciting time to join CSCCE and help us strengthen our internal infrastructure and processes as we continue to extend our impact within the STEM ecosystem.”
Lou Woodley
At the same time, thanks to separate funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, our friends at URSSI are looking to hire a new community manager. They’ll be working closely with CSCCE, including taking part in our brand new certification program and contributing to some of the materials development and event planning for the POSE grant.
You can find out more about our new hires in this companion blog post. We are looking to make these hires as soon as possible, so please don’t hesitate to let us know of your interest, or pass the opportunities on to others.
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