The Challenges & Opportunities of Sustaining Open Source Ecosystems
Open Innovation for Earth Observation Programmes
2-4 November 2022 | ESA-ESRIN | Frascati (Rm), Italy
Reflect on lessons from running an OSS community for the past decade
Scaling those practices to diverse audiences
and training research teams to build sustainable open-source ecosystems
Karthik Ram
University of California, Berkeley
@berkeley.edu
Berkeley Institute for Data Science
Pathways for Enabling Open Source Ecosystems
Lessons from a decade of OSS community building
01
In the early days, our core team built software for researchers
Early days of engaging with our community
Then we began accepting contributions. But 1:1 took a lot of time & effort
Inbound Contributions
The rOpenSci Dev Guide
Best practices for software development documented in a living book
Created a system to peer-review software
Creating a process for standardized peer-review
Became inspiration for The Journal of Open Source Software & PyOpenSci
Ignores conversations between humans
Jump in when called
Perform <actions>
return <output>
Enabling others to set up & host their own communities
Built r-universe, a system that allows any community to easily set up their own rOpenSci
CSCCE Collaboration Model
Convey, Consume
Contribute
Collaborate
Co-Create
Theory of Change
Open source was hard
UX became better
COPs emerged
Credit e.g. JOSS
OSPOs & Open Source Policy
Think about your stack as an OPSO
Challenges to sustainability
02
What does success look like for an open source project?
It depends
Do you support a user community, developer community, or both?
High user growth
Low user growth
High contributor growth
Low contributor growth
FEDERATION
CLUB
STADIUM
TOY
CHAOSS Metrics
CHAOSS Metrics
Success
Sustainability
Risk
Health
# Contributors, Users, Developers, Diversity, Growth and social diversity, openness index…
Quality model, Development base, size of niche, financial resources, resilience, relationships among people
Bus factor, Truck factor, Elephant factor…
Social health, Gender bias, Positive experience, Robustness, Productivity
Enabling Open Source Ecosystems (OSE)
03
Governance
Having a robust process around decision making and managing social collaboration
Organizational Management
The need to establish a managing organization from which to guide their growth
Community Management
Processes around building relationships within & across communities
Systems Health Considerations
Issues around OSS security & vulnerabilities, potential harm to communities
Business perspectives
Having a clear picture around invisible infrastructure costs and resources (funding and otherwise)
Security
Community
Sys Health
Governance
Business plan
Various factors enable open-source projects to become sustainable OSEs
Pathways for Enabling Open Source Ecosystems
Modest federation supporting software development in environmental sciences and statistics
Virtual institute to support best practices & community for research software development
Training to enable open source ecosystems to become more sustainable
Some takeaways
04
i
SCALING
Scaling impact of our open source activities was hard
ii
Co-creation
Supporting the community in co-creating tools was the way forward
iii
Ecosystem level support
Support your OSS developers in creating sustainable ecosystems
Challenges, solutions, & recommendations
01
CHALLENGES
Scaling of our activities was hard
02
03
SOLUTIONS
Enabling the community to co-create
RECOMMENDATIONS
Build a community of practice and enable OSS ecosystems to thrive
bit.ly/esrin
