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Maintainers & Contributors Roundtable §

Pattern Summary §

Convene a community of practice consisting of students and staff who are actively maintaining or contributing to university open source software projects in the research enterprise.

Problem / Challenge §

Active open source software maintainers and contributors are often scattered across laboratories and departments on university campuses.

In many cases, maintainers find themselves in isolated roles without a way of learning about each other’s work or a means of connecting.

A certain proportion of maintainers are experts in their research field but not in open source software development and lack the awareness of where and how to find the information they need.

Pattern Category §

  • Community Building
  • Education & Skills
  • Open Source Discovery
  • Promoting Best Practices

Context §

A research university creating large volumes of research outputs across every discipline.

A Research Software Engineer (RSE) or equivalent group does not currently exist (or lacks visibility) on campus.

Forces §

There is a growing or established interest in creating a community space for active maintainers or contributors to open source software.

Students and staff who are actively maintaining or contributing to university open source software projects want to connect with peers in similar roles and access advice.

The OSPO or Community Lead has the capacity to plan, promote and facilitate monthly meetings.

The OSPO wants to learn about the project activity and technical pain points directly from maintainers and contributors.

Solution §

Convene a regular community of practice to facilitate the sharing of project activity, best practices, pain points, and promote engagement of technical team members with the OSPO.

Promotion and Outreach §

The community of practice or ‘roundtable’ may be promoted in a number of ways, including:

  • Sourcing maintainer and core contributor of open source projects through direct communications with the Principal Investigators (PIs) of labs.

  • Inviting new members by promoting the community on our OSPO mailing list.

  • Advertising the meetings and sharing the rotating list of most commonly discussed topics on the OSPO website to give prospective members a sense of what may be discussed at any one meeting.

  • Requesting membership to provide referrals.

Meeting Preparation §

  • Typical meeting preparation involves room booking and food orders (if budgets are available).
  • Plan for a relevant topic/theme for each meeting that will engage the community members.
  • Where possible, contact community members whose expertise and interests match the topic.

Facilitating meetings §

  • Host on-site meetings once a month with a hybrid option for remote members.
  • Organize each meeting around one core topic/theme or specific project and advertise the topic in advance.
  • Typically, a member of the OSPO should take on the role of facilitator.
  • In order to encourage a safe and enjoyable learning space, the tone of the meeting can be casual and conversational.
  • The meetings should also have a code of conduct or established norms such as Chatham House Rule that encourage participants to share their thoughts freely.

Resulting Context §

Benefits for participants §

Creating a dedicated on-campus space for open source software maintainers and contributors fosters an essential sense of community and alleviates the isolation many have previously experienced in their roles.

Encouraging developers, coding leads, research scientists, and similar stakeholders to build relationships also instills a supportive network that generates collective problem-solving.

This newfound connection encourages knowledge and skills sharing.

Benefits for the OSPO §

Hosting a community of practice yields a number of positive outcomes for the OSPO: * Stronger relationships with open source maintainers and contributors on campus. * Greater engagement from community of practice members in other OSPO initiatives (e.g. workshops, consultations, mentorship). * Deeper insights into specific needs and pain points of this cohort. * Increased opportunity to discover new open source projects on campus. * Potential to amplify the impact of open source projects through the facilitation of knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Additional Learning from OpenSource@Stanford §

Open source is both a technical and social system so we leverage that by creating spaces for people to learn from each other.

Based on Lave & Wenger's "Situated Learning," we interpret a community of practice as a vibrant learning community where members collectively work towards gaining knowledge and competencies connected to their shared interests.

Outreach takes place at the start of the academic year when faculty and lab members are more responsive.

We host monthly meetings at lunchtime for 1 hour and provide lunch for in-person attendees. We also provide a Zoom option for remote members.

We have a dedicated Slack channel for members to connect, meaning anyone with an issue they would like input on can ask for feedback immediately, rather than waiting a month for the next meeting.

We adopt a "vote with your feet" approach, meaning we only expect people to attend a meeting that is valuable to them. This stems from our underlying philosophy that it is the OSPO's responsibility to continuously provide value to this group.

To strengthen the OSPO's relationship with developers, maintainers, coding leads, and similar stakeholders in attendance, we begin each meeting with OSPO updates and announcements.

The tone of the meeting is very casual and conversational, designed to allow everyone to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. We also observe Chatham House Rule at all meetings, and reinforce those norms regularly.

We organize a single meeting around one core topic/theme or specific project. Through our Slack channel, we extract relevant topics and ideas that members may be interested in or motivated by and ask them up/down vote on a topic of choice for the next meeting.

In cases where we feature a specific project, we keep track of who solicits the OSPO's help and offer the roundtable meeting as a forum to get feedback (conducted under Chatham House Rule unless requested otherwise).

Where possible, we personally reach out to community members whose expertise matches the pain points discussed to advise the presenter in real-time at the meeting.

We now get organic referrals from our OSPO community. As people attend meetings throughout the year, we find that many ask to invite peers in the same program or in their labs, and we have benefited from this organic approach.

Our growing M&CR membership also facilitated discovery of other open source projects (which we weren’t aware of) and these have joined our open source project registry.

A particularly valuable result is that members continue to stay in touch outside of monthly meetings. Having a dedicated communication channel (e.g. dedicated Slack channel, mailing list) for members to continue to share ideas, solicit advice, and build connection has made the monthly meeting cadence feel appropriate since there are many asynchronous touchpoints between meetings. We also maintain an active alumni group (composed of former members who have moved on to other academic or industry positions) and welcome them at meetings and on Slack.

In line with our aim to create a safe space for members, we do not invite faculty PI's to monthly meetings, unless there is a special session. In these cases, we notify members in advance. We based this on a simple idea that people behave differently when the "boss" is in the room and we’ve received positive feedback from members about this choice.

However, there is a possibility for convening an alternative community of practice that allows faculty members in the case where the faculty member is the maintainer of the project and would benefit from a similar community of other project maintainers.

Known Instances §

  • OpenSource@Stanford, Stanford Data Science Center for Open and Reproducible Science (CORES), Leland Stanford Junior University
  • UC OSPO Network, University of California

References §

Contributors & Acknowledgement §

  • Francesca Vera, Stanford University, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8791-3854
  • Zach Chandler, Stanford University, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2402-9839
  • Ciara Flanagan https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3153-7673