OSSci: Looking Back One Year; Looking Ahead One Year.
It’s been a wild year for OSSci, and I’m thrilled to share our progress, achievements, and future plans with you!
What is OSSci?
The Open Source Science Initiative is a NumFOCUS initiative dedicated to bridging the gap between open source developers and scientists. Our mission is to foster communication and collaboration between open science initiatives and stakeholders, enhancing the synergy between these two worlds.
OSSci is, in a word: community.
The OSSci Steering Committee:
What we do (largely in the past year)
Read on to learn about:
- Growing our community by spreading awareness of OSSci and NumFOCUS
- Out interest groups
- The Map of Open Source Science
- The Project Spotlight
- How we support the broader open source and open science ecosystems
Skip to the end to read about our plans for the next year.
Please reach out if you’d like to get involved with any of these programs (or explore an idea for a program that fits within OSSci’s scope)! You can reach me directly at: jon@numfocus.org.
Community Growth
Between the three team members and our first OSSci ambassador, we
managed to engage with over 40 events around the globe. These included major conferences such as The Open Source Summit and AI.dev, various PyData conferences and SciPy, as well as the inaugural IEEE Symposium on Open Source Science, along with a number of smaller, domain-specific conferences on computational chemistry (EuChems), reproducibility (ACM), and others.
We are particularly happy about our collaboration with the various teams
in the PyData network. We had a chance to attend, (co-)host, sponsor,
and/or send an ambassador to PyData meetups in Seattle, New York City,
Chicago, Padua (Italy), Accra (Ghana), Heidelberg, Cambridge (UK),
Hamburg, and Berlin, and look very much forward to continuing in 2024.
Interest groups
Our interest groups aim to connect open source developers and contributors with academics and researchers using or curious about open source tooling, as well as with industry professionals seeking to utilize open source tooling in their practice.
Join an interest group by visiting https://opensource.science.
This past year saw the launch of the Economics interest group with co-chairs from Blockscience, Econ-ARK, and The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. We also began uploading the recordings of interest group calls to YouTube, beginning with the Economics group.
We have 5 active interest groups
The Map of Open Source Science
MOSS is a comprehensive, composable, interactive map of the digital knowledge and research ecosystems. We identify connections between open source research software projects, research papers, organizations, patents, datasets, funding pathways, AI models and applications, and the people who drive it all.
We have blown through several milestones in MOSS over the past year, though really only the past 9 months as work began in earnest in October of 2023. Some major achievements include:
- Standing up a functioning proof of concept that demonstrates 9 use-cases
- Building a database over over 50,000 nodes and tens of thousands more connections
- Beginning to port our proof of concept into Neo4j (Thank you Mark Eyer!)
- Showcasing MOSS at dozens of events
- Growing the interest group to over 100 members from over 40 institutions and organizations
- Using our experience to support the UC OSPO mapping project
- Achieving mass data scraping capabilities through ecosyste.ms and OpenAlex (Thank you Mark Eyer!)
MOSS on Neo4j is an open source project. Contribute here.
Enjoy some images of the map below:
The project spotlight
The project spotlight series explores the history, usage, and evolution of open source tools, showcasing their impact on scientific research and the communities that develop and utilize them.
There have been 5 spotlights so far:
Shine the spotlight on your project: https://forms.gle/tP7jaaV9yjSH1tKm9
Support For the Broader Community and Ecosystem
Another Open Source Podcast
AOSP is a community podcast that invites members of the open source and open science communities in for a casual chat about deep topics. It is recorded in front of a live “studio” audience on The Scientific Python Community Discord server. The audience is welcome to participate and engage with the hosts and guests through the text or voice chat.
Jon and Juanita invite you to help them build and grow this initiative! There is plenty to do including helping to edit, promote, design images, build a website, develop a presence on social media, and create audio for our intro and outro. You can even host an episode if you’d like! There are 5 forms so far that will help you get involved.
Another Guest — Suggest a guest for the show
Another Topic — Suggest a topic for the show
Another Parent — Volunteer a parent for our “Another Open Source Parent” segment
Another Host — Volunteer to host an episode of the show
Another Community — Suggest a community platform in which we record an episode
OSSci Community Zulip
The OSSci Zulip Instance is an OSSci managed open server for any open science or open source community, project, or initiative that would like a hub for community dialogue without the overhead of management and moderation. It is also for anyone who would like to participate in discussions with other projects, people, and initiatives in open source/open science.
Feel free to join, request some streams, or just have a look around!
Support for FLOSS Mentoring Group
The FLOSS Mentoring Group is a cross-sector open source mentorship interest group. The group meets monthly and explores topics ranging from academic programs, mentee experiences and insights, OSPO needs, funding, and the future of mentorship in open source. OSSci is proud to support this emerging group.
Join the FLOSS Mentoring Discord server or the mailing list to get involved!
The Year Ahead
Focusing the OSSci initiative into a unified direction has been an energizing endeavor over the past year. While there are still a few loose ends to tie up, we now have a solid foundation from which we can guide our efforts. Our goal for the next year is to look towards programs that directly empower the individuals behind the open source software utilized in research; While we plan to launch several new interest groups, continue to develop MOSS, increase the frequency of project spotlight releases, and continue to support the broader ecosystem whenever we can, our principal focus will be on programs that deliver tangible resources, value, exposure, and opportunities to the people building, maintaining, and advancing the software and communities critical to scientific research.
We have a few new programs ready to launch, but we’d love to hear from you.
How do you think a dedicated, energetic group focused on empowering those who power open source can help?
What would you like to see us do?
What should we build?
Who should we connect with?
Think big.
jon@numfocus.org
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Learn more about OSSci, subscribe to our newsletter , and find links to our socials at https://opensource.science.
