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Open Source Catalog

Pattern Theme / Category

OSS Discovery

OSPO Problem / Challenge

  • A lack of up to date information on how much open source software is being produced in a university.

  • There is no effective mechanism to identify or to share information about open source creators, users, or projects within a university.

  • The lack of visibility makes it difficult to build community, foster collaboration, and contribute to the overall sustainability of open source efforts on campus.

Context

A large and decentralized university.

There is no central policy or mandate governing the creation or use of open source software (OSS). There is no requirement to register open source work or seek approval prior to creating or transitioning software to be open source.

Open source software is being created by affiliates of all types (e.g. students, faculty, researchers, staff), in many different contexts, for example: in classes, in labs, for personal use and/or to fulfill grant requirements.

Forces

Researchers and development teams on open science/open source projects are overburdened.

There are no incentives or obvious benefits for creators to contribute to a central open source catalog.

There are a number of platform constraints. OSS projects are hosted on a variety of platforms making it difficult to identify them for inclusion in a central resource.

There is limited time and personnel to identify, track, and catalog OS projects

Solution

Create a tool to collect and promote university OSS projects. The tool provides a public, centralized resource for creating awareness of university OSS projects.

  • As an initial step, create a draft catalog. Some useful tools for experimenting are WordPress plugins, embedding XLS sheets, creating tables, etc.

  • Consideration should be given to data fields, free text for submission and control vocabularies for sorting and filtering. (Microsoft Lists is helpful for establishing a set of entries.)

  • Holding informal consultations with colleagues for feedback on accessibility, style and structure can be very useful.

  • Publish the catalog on the institution’s OSPO website or on another relevant site.

Resulting Context

Additional learning from the Johns Hopkins University OSPO

In our case, we created a submission form using Gravity Forms and used Gravity Kit (formerly Gravity View) for the catalog.

The JHU OSPO now has a central, easily accessible location for gathering and sharing information about OSS projects on campus. This has the potential to increase collaboration and knowledge sharing among open source creators.

The catalog is only one of many initiatives aimed at discovering OSS projects on campus but it is essential in that it provides an easily accessible, centralized resource for capturing information about these projects and sharing this information broadly. Over time, we hope that more projects will contribute directly to the catalog. As it grows, the catalog will provide a better sense of open source activity and help us achieve our community-building goals.

Next steps are to publicize, encourage use and incentivize entries. Badging and gamification are under consideration.

Additional learning from OpenSource@Stanford

One of the objectives of the university-wide ‘Open Source Software Prize’ was to incentivize open source/open science projects to submit information to the new university project registry.

Known Instances

References

Author(s) & Acknowledgement