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OSPO Mailing List §

Pattern Summary §

Create a mailing list to maintain awareness of the OSPO and to promote engagement with a broad audience of stakeholders.

Problem / Challenge §

Academic OSPOs need to maintain visibility and demonstrate value to diverse stakeholders (e.g. university leadership, alumni and external partners).

These stakeholders are likely to be interested in the OSPO's work but don't have time or inclination to follow detailed discussions.

OSPOs also need a simple entry point for students, researchers, open source projects and potential contributors who want to learn more about potential opportunities.

Pattern Category §

  • Advocacy, Governance & Policy
  • Awareness
  • Community Building
  • Demonstrating value as an OSPO

Context §

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

An OSPO has been established and may be at an early stage of its development.

Forces §

OSPO staff may not have the time and resources to produce a newsletter on a regular basis.

Stakeholders are busy people who receive many emails and may quickly unsubscribe from anything that wastes their time.

The university may have existing mailing list platforms and brand guidelines that must be followed.

Solution §

Create an OSPO mailing list to communicate important information to OSPO stakeholders.

Gathering subscribers §

Subscribers can be added or identified in a number of ways:

  • Adding a join button to the OSPO website.
  • Providing an opt-in for attendees during registration for OSPO events.
  • Providing a join link on any email/digital communications from the wider university.
  • Providing an opt-out via self-subscription on the wider university lists service.
  • Direct promotion of the newsletter to interested groups on campus (e.g. tech groups, coder clubs etc.).
  • Direct promotion of the mailing list to maintainers and contributors identified in the discovery process for OSS projects on campus.
  • Direct promotion of the newsletter to key decision makers and leadership with an opt-in (or simple opt-out) to join.

Select tool or platform §

  • Liaise with communications colleagues on requirements to use university-approved platforms or tools for mailing lists.
  • If an existing university system for mailing lists is not in place, explore a range of self-hosted solutions.
  • Ensure that the correct settings for permissions are enabled.

Mailing list content §

Mailing list content should focus on announcements that will be valued by stakeholders, for example:

  • Dates and times for meet ups, training workshops and OSPO events.
  • New services for open source projects.
  • Funding opportunities for open source projects.
  • Calls to Action for open source initiatives.

Resulting Context §

An academic Open Source Program Office (OSPO) gains several strategic benefits from publishing a regular newsletter:

  • The mailing list serves as a regular channel for promoting the OSPO; signposting support for open source projects and the academic community; and also attracting new contributors/participants to open source projects.
  • Mailing list permissions may enable subscribers to reply directly to both the OSPO and/or all mailing subscribers. This allows greater spontaneous interaction with important audiences.

Additional Learning from OpenSource@Stanford, Stanford University §

When we originally set up our OSPO, we wanted to communicate important news about the OSPO on campus. However, as a nascent OSPO, we knew that we wouldn’t have regular news about our achievements to share on a monthly cadence.

We created our mailing list and use it for important updates and reminders about our events and regular meetings.

Additional learning from the University of California, Santa Barbara OSPO, UC OSPO Network §

We do have a UCSB mailing list. The sign up link is in the newsletter and on our website and in the newsletter itself.

In an open source survey that we conducted as part of the OSS discovery process on campus, we included a question where people could consent to be added to the mailing list.

We also advertise our events on other groups' Slacks/Google chats, (e.g. the IT Google group, Women in Tech Google Group, UC-Tech Slack, etc.), which helps boost mailing list sign-ups.

We use Constant Contact as part of the Library Communications Department's license and we use templates created by a staff graphic designer.

Additional Learning from the University of California OSPO Network §

Each campus in the UC network now has their own mailing list.

Before each campus’s first meetup, we used the results of a GitHub scraping for our repo browser, and sent meetup invites to a subset of that scraping. The

Principal Investigators on each campus also added relevant people to the invite list.

We didn’t subscribe invitees to the mailing list. They opted-in using a link in the invite or the meetup slides.

Each campus is using different platforms, including Google Groups and Mailchimp. Apart from UC Santa Barbara, we liaised with the library communications teams on the mailing platforms.

Known Instances §

References §

Contributors & Acknowledgement §

In alphabetical order

  • Ciara Flanagan, https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3153-7673
  • Francesca Vera, Stanford University, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8791-3854
  • Laura Langdon, University of California, Davis
  • Virginia Scarlett, University of California, Santa Barbara, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4156-2849