UCLA joins multi-UC campus effort to build network of open source program offices

The University of California has been awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation(opens in a new tab) to create UC-wide Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). Funding will expand the work of the Open Source Program Office at UC Santa Cruz(opens in a new tab) (UCSC) with collaborations at UCLA, Berkeley, Davis, Santa Barbara and San Diego to promote open source research, teaching and public service.

The UCLA program is co-led by Todd Grappone, associate university librarian for digital initiatives and information technology at UCLA Library, and Tim Dennis, Director of the UCLA Library Data Science Center. (opens in a new tab)As co-principal investigators, Grappone and Dennis will work in partnership with colleagues at UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara on outreach and educational programs.

"We are excited to be part of this program to build awareness and effective support for open source software as a critical component of UCLA Library’s goals around open scholarship," said Grappone. “As part of this project, we aim to focus on instruction and outreach around familiarizing open source concepts to new users. We also plan to host future campus events promoting open source software development, including hackathons and workshops.”

The effort is supported by a $1.85 million Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant that will serve to institutionalize the OSPO approach in the UC system by creating coordinated activities that support local campus OSPOs and building a network that can leverage multi-campus efforts. This award comes after a previous grant from the Sloan Foundation to establish the first Open Source Program Office at UCSC in 2022.

The principal investigator of the grant is James Davis, UCSC OSPO director and professor of computer science. The eleven co-principal investigators include: Grappone, who will co-direct with Dennis; Stephanie Lieggi, UCSC OSPO executive director; Fernando Pérez and Stéfan van der Walt at UC Berkeley; Peter Brantley and Vladimir Filkov at UC Davis; David Minor and Erik Mitchell at UC San Diego; and Amber Budden and Jonathan Balkind at UC Santa Barbara.

The establishment of OSPOs reflects the recognition in the UC system of the value of open source in increasing the impact of academic research and furthering the education and public services missions. Open source has been traditionally thought of as it relates to making software publicly available, but it can also include a more expansive view that includes library sciences, hardware development and more.

The UC OSPO Network effort represents a unique collaboration between UC campuses that allows each campus to develop infrastructure that promotes individual areas of excellence while leveraging the expertise of the entire network. This project will go beyond extending the work of the existing UCSC OSPO, instead allowing for novel and potentially groundbreaking approaches to leveraging open source and open science in an academic setting.

With the new grant, the UC OSPO network will pursue three main goals: to strengthen collaboration and knowledge sharing among the campuses, highlight to UC leadership the value of the network and OSPOs at various campuses, and identify resource and governance structure to allow the network to grow and thrive beyond the grant period. The UC OSPO network is also intended to serve as a model for other large systems to follow.

For more information about this grant award, see UCSC’s announcement(opens in a new tab). Learn more about the UC OSPO network at ospo.ucsc.edu. (opens in a new tab)