The Challenges & Opportunities of Sustaining Open Source Ecosystems

I gave a talk on Open Source Ecosystems (OSEs) at the Open Innovation for Earth Observation Programmes workshop organized by ESA and NASA in Frascati. In this talk, I describe how The rOpenSci Project began as a small club (using Nadia Asparouhova’s terminology) and grew into a modest federation by engaging the community collaboration models described by CSCCE. We started out by conveying tools, then accepting contributions, collaborating with researchers via the peer-review system, and finally enabling co-creation via the r-universe. I then cover how organizations like space agencies can stand up lightweight OSPOs to start, and use metrics (like those from CHAOSS) to help open-source projects thrive and succeed. I then cover the various factors necessary to turn a nascent project into an OSE from early conversations as part of my newly funded POSE training program.