Carlos Maltzahn | UCSC OSPO

Writing a blog about your OSRE 2025 project

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

OSRE participants are required to blog three times during their summer program. The first blog is a chance to introduce yourself and your project. The second blog occurs around the mid-point of the project and a final blog post is expected as part of you final project delverable. The organization administrator will send emails with specific dates. Instructions for the blog are indicated below. All blogs should include links to proposals, presentations, links to any deliverables/products as well as an overview of the student’s experience. Check out the student pages from previous years to get an idea of content / size.

We will also ask students and contributors to provide regular status updates which will help track your activities. The organization administrator will provide more details once the program work begins.

Making a pull request for your blog

Fork the git repository
If you haven’t already done so, add your profile using these instructions
- IMPORTANT: Under user_groups: add - 2025 Contributors (as opposed to any of the two mentor groups)
- The short bio and any other information goes below the frontmatter
Post your blog
- Add /content/report/osre25/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME/DATE-USERNAME/index.md
- Add a frontmatter to index.md, using the labels below
- Blog text goes below the frontmatter
- In that same directory include a picture and call it featured.png (also supports .jpg, .jpeg)
Commit to your fork and make a pull request. Email OSRE Admins with questions.

Example frontmatter and text body

---
title: "YOUR TITLE"
subtitle: "YOUR SUBTITLE (OPTIONAL)"
summary:
authors:
 - USERNAME1
 - USERNAME2
tags: ["osre25"]
categories: []
date: YYYY-MM-DD
lastmod: YYYY-MM-DD
featured: false
draft: false

# Featured image
# To use, add an image named `featured.jpg/png` to your page's folder.
# Focal points: Smart, Center, TopLeft, Top, TopRight, Left, Right, BottomLeft, Bottom, BottomRight.
image:
 caption: ""
 focal_point: ""
 preview_only: false
---

As part of the [PROJECTNAME](/project/osre25/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME) my [proposal](https://...) under the mentorship of MENTOR aims to ...

Writing a blog about your OSRE 2026 project

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Making a pull request for your blog

Fork the git repository
If you haven’t already done so, add your profile using these instructions
- IMPORTANT: Under user_groups: add - 2026 Contributors (as opposed to any of the two mentor groups)
- The short bio and any other information goes below the frontmatter
Post your blog
- Add /content/report/osre26/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME/DATE-USERNAME/index.md
- Add a frontmatter to index.md, using the labels below
- Blog text goes below the frontmatter
- In that same directory include a picture and call it featured.png (also supports .jpg, .jpeg)
Commit to your fork and make a pull request. Email OSRE Admins with questions.

Example frontmatter and text body

---
title: "YOUR TITLE"
subtitle: "YOUR SUBTITLE (OPTIONAL)"
summary:
authors:
 - USERNAME1
 - USERNAME2
tags: ["osre26"]
categories: []
date: YYYY-MM-DD
lastmod: YYYY-MM-DD
featured: false
draft: false

# Featured image
# To use, add an image named `featured.jpg/png` to your page's folder.
# Focal points: Smart, Center, TopLeft, Top, TopRight, Left, Right, BottomLeft, Bottom, BottomRight.
image:
 caption: ""
 focal_point: ""
 preview_only: false
---

As part of the [PROJECTNAME](/project/osre26/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME) my [proposal](https://...) under the mentorship of MENTOR aims to ...

40 Contributors participating in OSRE '24

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Summer 2024 OSRE supporting 40 students working on Open Source and Reproductivity

Thanks to the support from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the National Science Foundation FAIROS RCN program, the UCSC OSPO has matched 40 students with mentors to contribute to open source and reproducibility this year. This year GSoC awarded us a record 18 slots with the Summer of Reproducibility supporting another 22 students. We are also working with other funding opportunities to support the work of additional students – so our list will be growing.

Most projects will run from late May to the end of August / early September.

Funding for these contributors is provided by the NSF REPETO Project-sponsored Summer of Reproducibility, the Google Summer of Code, and Baskin Engineering. Check out the Student Pages where contributors have begun blogging updates about their summer projects!

How to add a new project idea to OSRE

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Instructions for adding/updating a project

A project serves as the context for one or more project ideas. Each project is represented as a web page with project information and ideas. Projects and their updates are subject to review of the OSRE administrators.

Preferred method (via git):
- Fork git repository
- Create content/project/osre26/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME directory or copy it from previous year’s content/project/osre25/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME
- In that directory create/update index.md and the project’s image (featured.png or featured.jpg)
- In index.md fill in the frontmatter (see example):
  - Add the project’s title in title:,
  - Date the project entry with date: and lastmod:, using the format YYYY-MM-DD, e.g. 2026-05-27. Note that projects dated in the future will not display.
  - Include a list of authors:, using either names in quotes or user names (see below for instructions on how to add user names)
  - IMPORTANT: set a list of tags that include "osre26". Feel free to add additional tags.
  - Below the frontmatter start with a description of the project and include links to the project’s webpage.
  - Add each project idea with level-3 header, i.e., ### ... and add a list of essential information that includes topics, skills, difficulty, size (175 vs 350 hours), and mentors.
  - Every mentor should at least have a mailto: link. Better yet: add the mentor using the instructions below and use the shortcut {{% mention "USERNAME" %}}. There should be at least two mentors per project idea.
- Make a pull request and email OSRE Admins (currently: Stephanie Lieggi).

If you are unable to upload via git please email OSRE Admins (currently: Stephanie Lieggi) for other options

Instructions for adding a mentor

Mentors are welcome to add information about themselves (see example):

Preferred methond (via git):
- Fork git repository (or combine with pull request of adding/updating a project above)
- Create /content/authors/USERNAME directory.
- In that directory copy an _index.md file from another user and update it (see example)
  - Many icons are available (see documentation)
  - IMPORTANT: Under user_groups: add - University of California Mentors.
  - The short bio and any other information goes below the frontmatter.
- Make a pull request and email OSRE Admins
Or email OSRE Admins
- Include name, title, affiliations, email, short bio, whether you are UC or Summer of Reproducibility mentor (or both), and, optionally, photo, web page and social media links.

I'm retiring!

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After 19 years at UC Santa Cruz I retired on December 15, 2023. The reason is entirely personal. I found my time at UC Santa Cruz extremely fulfilling, and I really enjoyed working with all of you!

I’m aware that this announcement comes rather sudden. In fact, I planned this step for a while. However as a soft money guy I won’t get funding for my group if I announce my retirement too early. So it’s a caught-a-tiger-by-the-tail kind of situation. I hope for your understanding.

I’m really happy about CROSS and the OSPO being able to continue in very capable hands: Stephanie Lieggi will continue as executive director and James Davis is succeeding me as faculty director — both are very familiar with the structure, vision, and finances of CROSS and the OSPO (James Davis has been serving on the CROSS Advisory Committee for a number of years). Also part of the leadership team will be Emily Lovell.

James fully supports the vision of the OSPO UC Santa Cruz and our effort to expand across multiple UC campuses with the “UC Network of OSPOs”. Stephanie is leading that amazing six-campus-spanning effort, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSB, UCSC, and UCSD. We are also seeing progress towards getting the OSPO UC Santa Cruz established as part of the Office of Research and work on having Stephanie lead it.

The new PIs and co-PIs for my ongoing grants are: Cormac Flanagan and Stephanie Lieggi for REPETO, Heiner Litz for IRIS-HEP, and Andrew Quinn for the LLNL subcontract with Todd Gamblin.

Foremost I thank my graduated Ph.D. students Sasha Ames (2011), Joe Buck (2014), Dimitris Skourtis (2014), Adam Crume (2015), Andrew Shewmaker (2016), Lucho Ionkov (2018), Michael Sevilla (2018), Noah Watkins (2018), Ivo Jimenez (2019), and Jianshen Liu (2023). Their passionate curiosity, never-ending sense of wonder, and hard work were the real reason why anything got accomplished.

I want to apologize to my current Ph.D. students for forcing them to pick a new advisor in the middle of their UC Santa Cruz careers. But I’m very happy that they all found great new advisors: Esmaeil Mirvakili is now working with Chen Qian, Farid Zakaria with Andrew Quinn, and Jayjeet Chakraborty with Heiner Litz.

I thank Sage Weil for creating Ceph, for the initial spark of an idea and incredible generosity without which CROSS would not exist, for lending his amazing track record and credibility to CROSS that was essential for recruiting our first industry members, and for sharing his technical expertise in many CROSS research and incubator project reviews. I thank Karen Sandler for writing part of the CROSS membership agreement and, together with Nissa Strottman, sharing their invaluable legal expertise and experience. I thank Doug Cutting for his great guest lectures, sharing his technical expertise, and explaining the Apache Software Foundation to us. I thank Nithya Ruff for championing CROSS at all the important places, and for connecting us to OSPO++, a fantastic community that is helping us establish an OSPO at UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses.

I thank Lavinia Preston, Cynthia McCarley, and Genine Scelfo as well as so many more fantastic individuals in the leadership and staff on all levels of the UC Santa Cruz campus for making everything work and for their skillful navigation of the UC Santa Cruz bureaucracy.

Finally but not least, I thank Scott Brandt for his invaluable support and mentorship without which my career at UC Santa Cruz would not have been possible. It all started when he suggested to me in early 2004, during my leave from industry, to check out the storage systems research group meetings at UC Santa Cruz.

Thank you all!

Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[This is a copy of the original post]

About the Event

Reproducibility is not just a sound scientific practice – it also has many potential practical applications in teaching and creating new research results. At this event, the attendees will learn about how to package their computer science research experiments in such a way that they are not only reproducible – but also practically reproducible, i.e., capable of being reproduced easily enough to be used as a mainstream method of interactive scientific exploration and exchange.

Sign up to learn about practical reproducibility on Chameleon, receive guidance on packaging your experiments, share insights and feedback on the reproducibility process, and much more!

Get your research out there!

All participants who attend the hackathon and successfully upload an experiment as a reproducible artifact on Trovi by the end of December 2023 will have their artifacts featured on Trovi during January 2024 and receive an invitation to have their research featured in our Chameleon blog.

We hope that participants can use their initial work and what they learn at the Hackathon to make future contributions to reproducibility workshops and conferences such as ACM REP.

Reproducibility Sessions

The Hackathon will consist of three sessions held throughout the day to accommodate folks outside of the Central time zone:

Session I: Tutorial – Packaging Experiments for Practical Reproducibility – 10-12pm CT
Session II: Open Work Period – Packaging Your Experiments – 1-4pm CT
Session III: Open Discussion – Share Your Experience – 4:10-5pm CT

Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend all three sessions.

I. Tutorial: Packaging Experiments for Practical Reproducibility

Session I will include an overview of Chameleon services, how to run experiments on Chameleon, how to package experiments for reproducibility, how to make such artifacts searchable and shareable, and other best practices for practical reproducibility. If you are interested in learning more about Chameleon Cloud and our digital artifact hub (Trovi), this session is for you!

Concepts may include how to use the NSF-funded Chameleon platform, one of the largest academic clouds, and how to package experiments for reproducibility using this platform; tools and services Chameleon provides to share experiments, including using Jupyter to manage the full experimental workflow including creating the environment, implementing the experiment body, and data analytics; using Chameleon daypass to give access to the testbed for reproducibility; as well as Trovi, an experiment sharing portal integrated with the testbed. The tutorial will also cover the existing experiment patterns available via Trovi representing common elements of experimental configurations such as e.g., configuring storage with RAID, NFS, or RDMA.

II. Open Work Period: Packaging Actual Experiments

During Session II, participants will work on packaging their experiments to share on the Chameleon digital artifact hub, Trovi, following the guidelines covered in Session I. Technical support and “office hours” will be provided for individuals and teams during this session. If you have an experiment that you have been wanting to share with others, this is a great opportunity to finally get that artifact online with some extra help and support from the Chameleon team!

No experiment to share at the moment? No problem! Participants are also encouraged to use this session to reproduce existing artifacts from a curated list of recommended experiments that we will post two weeks before the event.

How to come prepared for reproducibility success:

We recommend that participants who attend this session bring one of their own experiments that they would like to package and make available for reproducibility on Trovi. Experiments that already have an established code base with some documentation on GitHub or other public repositories are typically quicker to package and will be easier to work with during the session. Some knowledge of Chameleon and general cloud computing is also helpful (such as concepts covered in Session I). However, participants are not required to use Session II to package their experiments. Participants can also use the time to run other experiments that are already on Chameleon.

Participants will share their experiences during the hackathon and have time to ask more questions about the platform, give feedback on the Chameleon site, and brainstorm ideas to facilitate experiment reproducibility on public testbeds.

We hope to see you all on December 15!

Writing a blog about your OSRE 2024 project

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As last year, the Organization Admins will be asking students and contributors to provide regular status updates which will help us better highlight the work you are doing and track activities within our OSRE projects. These progress reports will also form the basis of blog reports prepared by students in the course of their summer. Blog reports should include links to proposals, presentations, reports, and an overview of the student’s experience.

Your experience is invaluable for future OSRE candidates and for improving the program every year.

Size and content

Keep it short and crisp. Include a short description of your project, a link to your project proposal, and, later in the program, links to the GSoC reports you provided.

Making a pull request for your blog

Fork the git repository
If you haven’t already done so, add your profile using these instructions
- IMPORTANT: Under user_groups: add - 2024 Contributors (as opposed to any of the two mentor groups)
- The short bio and any other information goes below the frontmatter
Post your blog
- Add /content/report/osre24/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME/DATE-USERNAME/index.md
- Add a frontmatter to index.md, using the labels below
- Blog text goes below the frontmatter
- In that same directory include a picture and call it featured.png (also supports .jpg, .jpeg)
Commit to your fork and make a pull request and email OSRE Admins (currently: Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn).

Example frontmatter and text body

---
title: "YOUR TITLE"
subtitle: "YOUR SUBTITLE (OPTIONAL)"
summary:
authors:
 - USERNAME1
 - USERNAME2
tags: ["osre24"]
categories: []
date: YYYY-MM-DD
lastmod: YYYY-MM-DD
featured: false
draft: false

# Featured image
# To use, add an image named `featured.jpg/png` to your page's folder.
# Focal points: Smart, Center, TopLeft, Top, TopRight, Left, Right, BottomLeft, Bottom, BottomRight.
image:
 caption: ""
 focal_point: ""
 preview_only: false
---

As part of the [PROJECTNAME](/project/osre24/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME) my [proposal](https://...) under the mentorship of MENTOR aims to ...

2023 UC Open Source Symposium

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Join us in creating new communities, partnerships, and collaborations in amplifying research impact with open source.

Preliminary Agenda →

Registration Now Open

Three-day hybrid event (in-person attendance highly encouraged, online participation welcome) that includes keynote speakers, expert panels, and technical workshops, as well as poster presentations and lightening talks highlighting the work of our Open Source Research Experience students.
Wed 9/27, Day 1 (hybrid): single-track program with keynotes and panels, Oktoberfest reception in the evening, all at the UC Santa Cruz Cowell Hay Barn, breakfast, lunch, dinner provided.
Thu 9/28, Day 2 (hybrid): two-track program of workshops at the UC Santa Cruz Engineering 2 building, breakfast, lunch
Fri 9/29, Day 3 (online-only): single-track program with workshops.

The event is organized by the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO). This year we are offering four levels of sponsorships to help make this event possible. The event follows this code of conduct.

Free for UC affiliated and remote participants
Cost for non-UC affiliated participants: $299

Interested in sponsoring this event? Sponsors get complimentary registration, recognition and other benefits (see below)

Sponsorship Level	Amount	Benefits
Silver Sponsors	$500	Acknowledgements + 1 free registration
Silver Sponsors	$1,000	Acknowledgements + 2 free registration
Gold Sponsors	$2,000	Acknowledgements + 4 free registrations
Platinum Sponsors	$4,000	Acknowledgements + 8 free registrations

Logistics

Parking

Link to UCSC Campus and Parking Map

Day 1 at Hay Barn: Parking permits will be available near the Hay Barn (lot 170) with overflow parking nearby in lot 116. Parking permits will be available from attendants upon arrival at the Hay Barn. For late arrivals come to the reception desk in the Hay Barn.
Day 2 at Baskin Engineering: Parking permits provided upon arrival at CORE WEST Parking. When you arrive, drive to the third floor of CORE WEST and request a free permit from the attendants. If you arrive after 10am, please go to the parking kiosk at the main entrance to pick up your permit.

Hotels in Santa Cruz

Dream Inn
175 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Call 831-426-4330 and ask for the UCSC rate (rates not available online)
The Hotel Paradox
611 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate
Fairfield Inn and Suites
2956 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate

Computational I/O Stack Workshop

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

👋 Join us for an exciting event featuring IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Yoichiro Tanaka (Tohoku University) discussing technological and institutional innovations to make the computational I/O stack a reality!

Agenda & Media of Past Event

The introduction of computational data management services into the I/O stack, especially in storage and networking devices, requires both technological innovations and new relations between university and industry. This one-day workshop will convene experts from storage systems, open source, and community architecture to discuss technologies and strategies for a computational I/O stack with low market entry barriers.

The workshop will take place on August 17, 2023 from 10am to 5pm, at UC Santa Cruz, Engineering 2 (room to be confirmed) and is jointly organized by the IEEE Magnetics Society’s Distinguished Lecturers Program, the Skyhook Data Management community with funding by the National Science Foundation (TI-2229773), the Center for Research in Open Source Software (cross.ucsc.edu), and the Open Source Program Office, UC Santa Cruz (ospo.ucsc.edu).

Agenda & Media of Past Event

The urgent need to make the value of open source visible and quantifiable to university leadership

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A surprisingly high number

Earlier this year, Frank Wuerthwein, Director of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) mentioned to me a number: 32,000. That’s the estimated number of public GitHub repositories that UC San Diego faculty and students have contributed to. This discovery is interesting in at least two ways:

It is an example of an intuitive metric for at least a first-order approximation of the value of open source to the university’s research enterprise, and
Even if it turns out that only a fraction of 32,000 repositories represents significant work, these repositories provide a treasure trove of data to greatly improve that approximation.

Quoting Frank:

There is a sense that 100’s of faculty and thousands of students are contributing or have contributed to open source projects. These numbers were presented in a meeting that high level leadership at UCSD participated (VCR, EVC, CTO, …) and the statement made quite a stir.

Software production will be regulated

It is high time for the leadership of universities to understand the value of open source to their research enterprise. Software is now so important to society and the associated threat of cybercrime so great that legislation to regulate the software industry is coming. At the forefront is the European Union with its proposed Cyber Resiliency Act (CRA) which considers declaring software hazardous and might require as early as next year a burden of documentation and certification to ensure safety of software that is well beyond the means of most open source projects. While the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation (see the excellent presentation by Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich), the Drupal Association, the Apache Software Foundation, and GitHub are among the growing number of organizations that are recognizing the impact of this proposed legislation and are actively lobbying for amendments, there is, according to Milinkovich no engagement from universities (clip from the excellent May 10, 2023 Apereo Micro Conference hosted by Apereo Executive Director Patrick Masson).

Getting universities engaged

I think there is a good reason for this lack of engagement: universities have little to no data to justify engagement. While universities employ considerable staff to carefully track fund raising, publications, student enrollments, licensing income, and all kinds of other indications of societal impact, there are little to no resources dedicated to track the role of software – particularly open source software – in research, reproducibility, teaching, technology transfer, and how universities engage with outside stakeholders.

The “32,000 repositories” number of a single university campus (UC San Diego) extrapolated to all research universities is just one (and very crude) indicator that the potential impact of coming legislation like EU’s CRA might be significant. As the OSPO of UC Santa Cruz, the first within the UC system, we feel an urgent responsibility for making the value of open source visible and quantifiable so that the need to engage becomes obvious.

Proposing the Open source Repo Browser

Luckily, the technologies to help make that a reality already exist: large repository hubs such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket have query APIs for discovering public repositories. We are now working with UC San Diego on extending their repository discovery to other UC campuses towards a University of California system-wide Open source Repository Browser (UC ORB). Sophisticated measurement tools exist that can characterize these repositories, including their research topics, their dependencies, their development processes, their maturity, and their community health. We will partner with Bitergia, the market leader in these tools, to ensure that we apply state of the art from the beginning. Bitergia specializes in providing quality data about open source projects and has a ready-to-use open source platform, CHAOSS GrimoireLab. By leveraging Bitergia’s knowledge and platform, we avoid building tools for which open source solutions already exist and are enabled to focus on the interesting questions that can be answered by working with the data.

Virtuous Cycles of Visibility

This dataset is however only a first approximation of the set of all relevant repositories. To achieve high precision and recall, these queries would have to be continually updated as new research efforts emerge, especially in large multi-campus institutions like the University of California. Thus, we will complement this effort by creating incentives for researchers to register their repositories. One example is the OSPO UC Santa Cruz’ Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) which enables researchers to register their projects with Google Summer of Code and other outreach efforts. Profiling these registered repositories will allow us to identify similar projects in the dataset for targeted promotion of OSPO programs. Thus, while the initial dataset will have imperfect precision and recall, it provides a great starting point for bootstrapping UC ORB and using incentives created by OSPO programs to achieve high precision and recall. We expect that UC ORB’s success will incentivize researchers to more carefully design their repository profiles so their projects are more easily discovered. These optimizations will increase research visibility, and by extension, strengthen the impact of the UC system. We in collaboration with other UC campuses will promote UC ORB to external stakeholders such as Open Source Science (a collaboration between NumFOCUS and IBM Research who are working on mapping the landscape of open source software used in science), companies who are interested in engaging with researchers, and open source foundations who are interested in supporting new technologies.

Reducing the burden of software regulation

UC ORB will be just one instance of valuable datasets that will be hopefully established in many other universities, not only for statistics about the value of open source software but also for university researchers to explore new ways to reduce the burden of supply chain security and software safety assurance. Whatever software regulation is going to look like in the future, there is an urgent need for society to find paths towards greater security and safety without diminishing the flow of innovation. Once the value of open source software becomes visible, universities with their outstanding research talent are in a great position to not only engage but provide valuable insights of how software should be regulated in the future.

Looking for funding

I’m looking for funding for this important project. Please contact me if you or someone you know might be interested in supporting this effort.

A Record 38 Contributors participating in OSRE '23

Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year’s Open Source Research Experience is off to a fantastic start, with 38 contributors getting ready to work this summer on projects spanning open source hardware, software, and reproducibility in research and in teaching. Funding for these contributors is provided by the NSF REPETO Project-sponsored Summer of Reproducibility, the 2023 Google Summer of Code, and Baskin Engineering’s Inclusive Excellence Hub.

Check out the Student Pages where contributors have begun blogging updates about their summer projects!

CROSS, Skyhook, and Polyphy

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We would like to invite you to a day-long hybrid workshop on April 27, 2023, entitled “CROSS, Skyhook, and Polyphy: Institutional support for creating Paths to Open Source Ecosystems for Open Source Products in Research." This hybrid workshop will be held at UC Santa Cruz with remote access for participants unable to attend in-person.

With support from an NSF Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) Phase 1 grant, the NSF Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High-Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP), and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the goal of the workshop is to scope out self-sustaining ecosystems for the Skyhook and Polyphy projects and to create an institutional model within the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) and the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) UC Santa Cruz to create paths to sustainable open source ecosystems for research products across UC campuses.

A draft agenda for the event ~~will be provided by March 27~~ is available here as well as a white paper that will form the basis for the day’s discussion. The workshop’s interactive sessions will discuss strategies for creating and sustaining institutional support for creating open source ecosystems, using Skyhook and Polyphy as examples. We will also hear updates from our CROSS fellows about their research projects that are already creating open source products that likely will benefit from institutional support for open source ecosystems in the future.

2023 UCSC Open Source for Business

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The OSPO at UC Santa Cruz is pleased to be hosting the third Summer Seminar Series for our affiliated researchers, students and industry partners facilitated by Dr. Dirk Riehle, Professor of Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg.

The seminar entitled Open Source for Business consists of 12 lectures addressing everything you need to understand open source and to develop a corporate open source strategy.

Registration information

Module 1: Open source software

July 10th, 2023 - Lecture 1: Open-source software

July 12th, 2023 - Lecture 2: The software supply chain

July 13th, 2023 - Lecture 3: Compliance and security

Module 2: Supply chain economics

July 17th, 2023 - Lecture 4: Community open source projects

July 19th, 2023 - Lecture 5: Software supply chain economics

July 21th, 2023* - Lecture 6: Open source foundations and consortia note date change from original schedule

Module 3: Commercial open source

July 24th, 2023 - Lecture 7: Commercial open source business models

July 26th, 2023 - Lecture 8: The new proprietary open source

July 27th, 2023 - Lecture 9: Intellectual property strategies

Module 4: Open source strategy

July 31th, 2023 - Lecture 10: The open source program office

Aug 1st, 2023 - Lecture 11: Open source risk management

Aug 2nd, 2023 - Lecture 12: The corporate open source strategy

CROSS, Skyhook, and Polyphy

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Please fill out this brief attendees form ~~by April 4~~ to let us know if you think you will be able to participate – either in person or remotely.

Sponsor Open Source Research Experience

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Is your organization looking to better utilize open source and want to support projects that directly benefit your work?

Does your company want to strengthen the talent pipeline able to work on technologies essential to your organization’s success?

Do you want to collaborate with innovative open source projects being developed by University of California researchers?

Sponsor Projects –>

The UC Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) offers your organization the chance to participate in projects that can help your development cycles run faster, benefit from wide collaborations, and help support workforce development in domains your organization needs.

To become a sponsor, fill out the Sponsorship Interest Form. You will be asked to indicate the level of sponsorship you would like to fund and the open source projects you are most interested in engaging with.

Overview of Program

The OSRE includes University of California-based open source projects covering multiple disciplines. Our mentors, who are faculty and researchers from throughout the UC system, have provided a list of project ideas that will be the basis for the OSRE student’s work.

Launched in 2020, the Open Source Research Experience program has developed into a marketplace for open source project ideas that matches students to mentors, and engages sponsoring organizations to fund and participate in open source based summer internships. The goal of this program is to increase student capabilities in working in open source, add productive contributors to on-going projects, and further promote open source as a way to engage with communities spanning industry and academia.

OSRE mentors have posted their project ideas for undergraduates to review and help them create proposals for the summer. Industry partners and other outside sponsors can sponsor OSRE summer student funding and indicate their interest in particular projects.

Benefits of sponsorship

Collaborating on innovative project that are of strategic interest to your industry;
Supporting the teaching of open source techniques to a wide range of student contributors;
Interacting with the next generation of open source leaders and up and coming talent; and
Recognition as an OSRE Sponsor at the Open Source Research Symposium (Fall 2023)

Table: OSRE 2023 Sponsorship Levels
Level	Amount
Bronze	$3,750 (covers 50% of one student stipend for summer)
Silver	$7,500 (covers one student full-time for summer)
Gold	$15,000 (covers two students full-time for summer)

Becoming a sponsor is easy! Fill out the Sponsorship Interest Form or reach out to the OSRE Admins by April 20. Information requested by the form include: name of contact person, level of sponsorship, and projects you are most interested in (if applicable.) The OSRE Admins will follow up with next steps for finalizing the sponsorship process.

Sponsor Projects –>

Accepted as 2023 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are very excited to have been selected as a 2023 Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. The 2023 Open Source Research Experience and with it the 2023 Summer of Reproducibility will therefore benefit from GSOC’s world-wide outreach and generous funding of contributors. We are now listed among 172 selected mentor organizations. We are listed under “Data” and “Science and medicine”.

Since 2018, the we have successfully mentored a total of 22 GSoC students. We look forward to mentoring this year’s students.

Interested students can check out our projects for proposal ideas from our mentors. Our projects cover a wide range of topics this year. Students are encouraged to reach out to our mentors during the proposals stage. See our student information section

Creating a ROS 2 Open Source Distribution

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:15:56 -0700

Abstract: The Robot Operating System (now ROS 2) is an open source middleware for operating robots. Similarly to Linux, Kubernetes, or OpenStack, ROS 2 has grown to be so complex that building ROS 2 from scratch has become impossible for most users. Hence, like in the other examples, users want to use a preconfigured well-integrated open source distribution of ROS 2. Open source distributions are being created in practice, but have not seen any research yet. In this talk, I will outline the challenges I see with building well-integrated, reproducible/verifiable, and certifiable open source distributions using ROS 2 as the example. I will speculate how beyond research, a commercial product could be created.

Audience: Researchers interested in open source, robotics, and startups

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, Univ. Erlangen / Bayave GmbH

Bio: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, M.B.A., is the Professor of Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before joining academia, Riehle led the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs, LLC, in Palo Alto, California (Silicon Valley). Riehle founded the Open Symposium, now the international conference on open collaboration. He was also the lead architect of the first UML virtual machine. He is interested in open source and inner source software engineering, agile software development methods, complexity science and human collaboration, and software system architecture, design, and implementation. Prof. Riehle holds a Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zürich and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He welcomes email at dirk@riehle.org, blogs at https://dirkriehle.com, and tweets as @dirkriehle.

CephFS

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:15:56 -0700

CephFS is a distributed file system on top of Ceph. It is implemented as a distributed metadata service (MDS) that uses dynamic subtree balancing to trade parallelism for locality during a continually changing workloads. Clients that mount a CephFS file system connect to the MDS and acquire capabilities as they traverse the file namespace. Capabilities not only convey metadata but can also implement strong consistency semantics by granting and revoking the ability of clients to cache data locally.

CephFS namespace traversal offloading

Topics: Ceph, filesystems, metadata, programmable storage
Skills: C++, Ceph / MDS
Difficulty: Medium
Size: Large (350 hours)
Mentor: Carlos Maltzahn

The frequency of metadata service (MDS) requests relative to the amount of data accessed can severely affect the performance of distributed file systems like CephFS, especially for workloads that randomly access a large number of small files as is commonly the case for machine learning workloads: they purposefully randomize access for training and evaluation to prevent overfitting. The datasets of these workloads are read-only and therefore do not require strong coherence mechanisms that metadata services provide by default.

The key idea of this project is to reduce the frequency of MDS requests by offloading namespace traversal, i.e. the need to open a directory, list its entries, open each subdirectory, etc. Each of these operations usually require a separate MDS request. Offloading namespace traversal refers to a client’s ability to request the metadata (and associated read-only capabilities) of an entire subtree with one request, thereby offloading the traversal work for tree discovery to the MDS.

Once the basic functionality is implemented, this project can be expanded to address optimization opportunities, e.g. describing regular tree structures as a closed form expression in the tree’s root, shortcutting tree discovery.

Eusocial Storage Devices

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:15:56 -0700

As storage devices get faster, data management tasks rob the host of CPU cycles and main memory bandwidth. The Eusocial project aims to create a new interface to storage devices that can leverage existing and new CPU and main memory resources to take over data management tasks like availability, recovery, and migrations. The project refers to these storage devices as “eusocial” because we are inspired by eusocial insects like ants, termites, and bees, which as individuals are primitive but collectively accomplish amazing things.

Dynamic function injection for RocksDB

Skills: C/C++, Java
Difficulty: Challenging
Size 175 or 350 hours
Mentor: Jianshen Liu

Recent research reveals that the compaction process in RocksDB can be altered to optimize future data access by changing the data layout in compaction levels. The benefit of this approach can be extended to different data layout optimization based on application access patterns and requirements. In this project, we want to create an interface that would allow users to dynamically inject layout optimization functions to RockDB, using containerization technologies such as Webassembly.

Reference: Saxena, Hemant, et al. “Real-Time LSM-Trees for HTAP Workloads.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06801 (2021).

Demonstrating a composable storage system accelerated by memory semantic technologies

Skills: C/C++, Bash, Python, System architecture, Network fabrics
Difficulty: Challenging
Size 350 hours
Mentor: Jianshen Liu

Since the last decade, the slowing down in the performance improvement of general-purpose processors is driving the system architecture to be increasingly heterogeneous. We have seen the kinds of domain-specific accelerator hardware (e.g., FPAG, SmartNIC, TPU, GPU) are growing to take over many different jobs from the general-purpose processors. On the other hand, the network and storage device performance have been tremendously improved with a trajectory much outweighed than that of processors. With this trend, a natural thought to continuously scale the storage system performance economically is to efficiently utilize and share different sources from different nodes over the network. There already exist different resource sharing protocols like CCIX, CXL, and GEN-Z. Among these GEN-Z is the most interesting because, unlike RDMA, it enables remote memory accessing without exposing details to applications (i.e., not application changes). Therefore, it would be interesting to see how/whether these technologies can help improve the performance of storage systems, and to what extent. This project would require building a demo system that uses some of these technologies (especially GEN-Z) and run selected applications/workloads to better understand the benefits.

References: Gen-Z: An Open Memory Fabric for Future Data Processing Needs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb9nojNS8E, Pekon Gupta, SMART Modular; Gen-Z subsystem for Linux, https://github.com/linux-genz

When will Rotational Media Users abandon SATA and converge to NVMe?

Skills: Entrepreneurial mind, interest in researching high technology markets
Difficulty: Medium
Size: 350 hours
Mentor: Carlos Maltzahn

Goal: Determine the benefits in particular market verticals such as genomics and health care to converge the storage stack in data center computer systems to the NVMe device interface, even when devices include rotational media (aka disk drives). The key question: “When do people abandon SATA and SAS and converge to NVMe?”

Background: NVMe is a widely used device interface for fast storage devices such as flash that behave much more like random access memory than the traditional rotational media. Rotational media is accessed mostly via SATA and SAS which has served the industry well for close to two decades. SATA in particular is much cheaper than NVMe. Now that NVMe is widely available and quickly advancing in functionality, an interesting question is whether there is a market for rotational media devices with NVMe interfaces, converging the storage stack to only one logical device interface, thereby enabling a common ecosystem and more efficient connectivity from multiple processes to storage devices.

The NVMe 2.0 specification, which came out last year, has been restructured to support the increasingly diverse NVMe device environment (including rotational media). The extensibility of 2.0 encourages enhancements of independent command sets such as Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) and Key Value (NVMe-KV) while supporting transport protocols for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). A lot of creative energy is now focused on advancing NVMe while SATA has not changed in 16 years. Having all storage devices connect the same way not only frees up space on motherboards but also enables new ways to manage drives, for example via NVMe-oF that allows drives to be networked without additional abstraction layers.

Suggested Project Structure: This is really just a suggestion for a starting point. As research progresses, a better structure might emerge.

Convergence of software stack: seamless integration between rotational media and hot storage

Direct tiering: one unified interface to place data among fast and slow devices on the same NVMe fabric depending on whether the data is hot or cold.

Computational storage:

What are the architectures of computational NVMe devices? For example, offloading compute to an FPGA vs an onboard processor in a disk drive?
Do market verticals such as genomics and health care for one over the other? When do people abandon SATA and converge to NVMe?

Project tasks:

Review current literature
Survey what the industry is doing
Join weekly meetings to discuss findings with Ph.D. students, experienced industry veterans, and faculty (Thursday’s 2-3pm, can be adjusted if necessary)
Product is a slide deck with lots of pictures

Interesting links:
https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Storage/NVMeHDD
https://2021ocpglobal.fnvirtual.app/a/event/1714 (video and slides, requires $0 registration)
https://www.storagereview.com/news/nvme-hdd-edges-closer-to-reality
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-demonstrates-hdd-with-pcie-nvme-interface
https://nvmexpress.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-nvme-2-0-specifications-and-new-technical-proposals/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-2-0-supports-hard-disk-drives

Writing a blog about your OSRE 2023 project

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 11:15:56 -0700

Starting in 2023 the Organization Admins will be asking students and contributors to provide regular status updates which will help us better highlight the work you are doing and track activities within our OSRE projects. These progress reports will also form the basis of blog reports prepared by students in the course of their summer. Blog reports should include links to proposals, presentations, reports, and an overview of the student’s experience.

Your experience is invaluable for future OSRE candidates and for improving the program every year.

Size and content

Keep it short and crisp. Include a short description of your project, a link to your project proposal, and, later in the program, links to the GSoC reports you provided.

Making a pull request for your blog

Fork the git repository
If you haven’t already done so, add your profile using these instructions
- IMPORTANT: Under user_groups: add - 2023 Contributors (as opposed to any of the two mentor groups)
- The short bio and any other information goes below the frontmatter
Post your blog
- Add /content/report/osre23/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME/DATE-USERNAME/index.md
- Add a frontmatter to index.md, using the labels below
- Blog text goes below the frontmatter
- In that same directory include a picture and call it featured.png (also supports .jpg, .jpeg)
Commit to your fork and make a pull request and email OSRE Admins (currently: Stephanie Lieggi, Carlos Maltzahn).

Example frontmatter and text body

---
title: "YOUR TITLE"
subtitle: "YOUR SUBTITLE (OPTIONAL)"
summary:
authors:
 - USERNAME1
 - USERNAME2
tags: ["osre23"]
categories: []
date: YYYY-MM-DD
lastmod: YYYY-MM-DD
featured: false
draft: false

# Featured image
# To use, add an image named `featured.jpg/png` to your page's folder.
# Focal points: Smart, Center, TopLeft, Top, TopRight, Left, Right, BottomLeft, Bottom, BottomRight.
image:
 caption: ""
 focal_point: ""
 preview_only: false
---

As part of the [PROJECTNAME](/project/osre23/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME) my [proposal](https://...) under the mentorship of MENTOR aims to ...

Mentoring FARR Fellow Milad Hakimshafaei

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 11:15:56 -0700

I’m very proud to have the OSPO UC Santa Cruz play a part of Baskin Engineering Inclusive Excellence Hub’s Fellowship for Anti-Racism Research (FARR) by providing mentorship to computational media Ph.D. student Milad Hakimshafaei in his work to expand diverse perceptions in visual design.

Incubator Fellow and PolyPhy Project Lead Oskar Elek and Stephanie Lieggi, executive director for OSPO and the Center for Research in Open Source Software, Hakimshafaei will develop an interface built off of an existing web-based AI generator that will allow the end user to control the system’s behavior to generate interesting and unique patterns. By studying a broad array of users’ visual design aesthetic preferences, he plans to develop algorithms that better represent the experience of beauty for different people.

I encourage you to read the full news release.

2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:30:00 +0000

Join us in creating new communities, partnerships, and collaborations in amplifying research impact with open source.

In Case You Missed It, Recordings from The UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium are available now!

WATCH HERE

This year’s event is organized by the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and we thank our sponsors to help make this event possible. The event follows this code of conduct. It includes keynote speakers, expert panels, and technical workshops, as well as poster presentations highlighting the work of our Open Source Research Experience students. This year we are excited to host keynotes by Demetris Cheatham (GitHub), Nithya Ruff (Amazon), Karsten Wade (Red Hat), and Stephen Walli (Microsoft).

Free for UC affiliated and remote participants
Cost for non-UC affiliated participants: $299

Interested in sponsoring this event? Sponsors get complimentary registration, recognition and other benefits (see below)

Agenda Overview

Tue 9/27 @ UC Santa Cruz Hay Barn (directions). Plenary (single-track) sessions. In-person participation limited to 50 people; remote participation also available.
Wed 9/28 @ UC Santa Cruz Baskin Engineering 2 (directions). Technical Workshops (two-track). In-person participation limited to 60 people; Remote participation also available.
Thu 9/29, Fully Remote. Technical Workshops (single-track).

Detailed Agenda

(separate page or scroll below)

WATCH HERE

Sponsorship Level	Amount	Benefits
Silver Sponsors	$500	Acknowledgements + 1 free registration
Gold Sponsors	$1,000	Acknowledgements + 2 free registrations
Platinum Sponsors	$2,000	Acknowledgements + 4 free registrations

Logistics

Parking

Link to UCSC Campus and Parking Map

Day 1 at Hay Barn: Parking permits will be available near the Hay Barn (lot 170) with overflow parking nearby in lot 116. Parking permits will be available from attendants upon arrival at the Hay Barn. For late arrivals come to the reception desk in the Hay Barn.
Day 2 at Baskin Engineering: Parking permits provided upon arrival at CORE WEST Parking. When you arrive, drive to the third floor of CORE WEST and request a free permit from the attendants. If you arrive after 10am, please go to the parking kiosk at the main entrance to pick up your permit.

Hotels in Santa Cruz

Dream Inn
175 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Call 831-426-4330 and ask for the UCSC rate (rates not available online)
The Hotel Paradox
611 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate
Fairfield Inn and Suites
2956 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate

2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:30:00 +0000

Join us in creating new communities, partnerships, and collaborations in amplifying research impact with open source.

In Case You Missed It, Recordings from The UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium are available now!

WATCH HERE

Free for UC affiliated and remote participants
Cost for non-UC affiliated participants: $299

Interested in sponsoring this event? Sponsors get complimentary registration, recognition and other benefits (see below)

Agenda Overview

Tue 9/27 @ UC Santa Cruz Hay Barn (directions). Plenary (single-track) sessions. In-person participation limited to 50 people; remote participation also available.
Wed 9/28 @ UC Santa Cruz Baskin Engineering 2 (directions). Technical Workshops (two-track). In-person participation limited to 60 people; Remote participation also available.
Thu 9/29, Fully Remote. Technical Workshops (single-track).

Detailed Agenda

(separate page or scroll below)

WATCH HERE

Sponsorship Level	Amount	Benefits
Silver Sponsors	$500	Acknowledgements + 1 free registration
Gold Sponsors	$1,000	Acknowledgements + 2 free registrations
Platinum Sponsors	$2,000	Acknowledgements + 4 free registrations

Logistics

Parking

Link to UCSC Campus and Parking Map

Day 1 at Hay Barn: Parking permits will be available near the Hay Barn (lot 170) with overflow parking nearby in lot 116. Parking permits will be available from attendants upon arrival at the Hay Barn. For late arrivals come to the reception desk in the Hay Barn.
Day 2 at Baskin Engineering: Parking permits provided upon arrival at CORE WEST Parking. When you arrive, drive to the third floor of CORE WEST and request a free permit from the attendants. If you arrive after 10am, please go to the parking kiosk at the main entrance to pick up your permit.

Hotels in Santa Cruz

Dream Inn
175 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Call 831-426-4330 and ask for the UCSC rate (rates not available online)
The Hotel Paradox
611 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate
Fairfield Inn and Suites
2956 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate

NSF will fund design of a support infrastructure for CROSS incubator project

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 19:15:56 -0700

I am delighted to be one of the inaugural Phase 1 awardees of the NSF/TIP Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, with Stephanie Lieggi as co-PI. The goal of this 1-year, $300,000 project is to explore support infrastructures for Skyhook Data Management, a graduated CROSS incubator project.

Title: POSE: Phase I: Scoping the Ecosystem of Skyhook Data Management

Abstract: New, well-funded, and fast-moving open source ecosystems around big data and data science have emerged due to the successful business models in hyperscale computing industries. These include the Apache Arrow ecosystem for processing structured data and the Ceph distributed storage ecosystem. Skyhook Data Management embeds Apache Arrow in Ceph and is a result of years of storage systems research at UC Santa Cruz where Ceph originated. Embedding processing of data into storage can dramatically reduce data movement, a major cost center in datacenters. This Phase 1 project explores sustainable and effective pathways for establishing open source as an alternative translation for technologies using Skyhook as a pilot project. The project’s novelties are a series of workshops which are convening open source experts and community leaders with diverse backgrounds to figure out governance, staffing and staff retention strategies for Skyhook while also building out expertise for open tech transfer within the university. As co-founder of the Ceph project, as founder and leader of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Open Source Software and the Open Source Program Office UC Santa Cruz the investigators are well-positioned to convene these workshops due to their professional network of open source experts in industry and foundations. An important focus in these workshops is inclusiveness to foster a diverse community and encourage participation from historically excluded communities. The project’s impacts are the adoption of Skyhook technology for production, for reproducible research prototyping, and as a teaching tool in classrooms, and the establishment of open source as a viable translation path of technologies for research universities.

Apache Arrow is a representation of columnar data in memory which has created a wide-ranging and rapidly growing open source ecosystem of efficient data processing with many different programming language bindings (so far C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Julia, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust). Due to the common representation, data can move efficiently without conversion between the ecosystem’s processing engines running on different systems. Data processing and exchange can be implemented with a number of building blocks that includes the Parquet file format, the Flight framework for efficient data interchange between processes, the Gandiva LLVM-based JIT computation for executing analytical expressions by leveraging modern CPU SIMD instructions to process Arrow data, the Acero streaming execution engine for query plans, and Awkward Array for restructuring computation on columnar and nested data. On top of these building blocks exist a number of Arrow integration frameworks, including the Fletcher framework that integrates FPGAs with Apache Arrow, Nvidia’s RAPIDS cuDF framework that integrates GPUs with Apache Arrow, the Plasma high-performance shared-memory object store, and the Substrait open format for query plans between query optimizers and processing engines. Skyhook integrates Ceph with Arrow by embedding Arrow processing engines within Ceph storage objects such that objects can be accessed via Apache Arrow API calls that are executed on a storage server. API calls are atomic and, in case of failures, Ceph automatically remaps the call to another server where the object is available due to storage redundancy. Skyhook aims to become a research prototyping ecosystem and a blueprint for efficiently embedding data processing libraries in storage systems and computational storage devices while enabling processing and storage ecosystems to evolve independently.

🧪 Open Source Research Experience

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 12:23:07 -0700

🪺 Open Source Incubator Fellowship

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:10:07 -0700

Overview

The Open Source Incubator Fellowship, funded through through the UCSC Open Source Program Office (OSPO), supports the work of postdoctoral scholars aiming to create and grow productive open source contributor communities around innovative research prototypes in order to amplify the impact of their research. A successful application includes (1) a research prototype with significant open source software or hardware infrastructure typically created as part of the applicant’s Ph.D. project and (2) strong evidence that the proposed project would be met with great interest by at least one well-established open source community.

Incubator Fellows play the role of “open source ambassadors” at UC Santa Cruz by displaying exemplary open source project and community management practices and by sharing their experience via mentorship and classroom instructions so students learn how to productively engage in open source projects. Ideal incubator fellows are inclusive, comfortable reaching across different scientific disciplines, and run compelling projects that have broad interdisciplinary appeal.

Current Incubator Fellows

Thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation the OSPO can currently fund up to two incubator fellows. The OSPO is in the process of raising more funding to expand the Incubator Fellowship within UC Santa Cruz and across other UC campuses. Please welcome the inaugural 2022 cohort:

Dr.-Ing. Oskar Elek

Dr.-Ing. Oskar Elek works on the project “Polyphorm + PolyPhy: An open source software platform for learning and visualizing connectivity patterns in complex datasets.” For more information, please see his website.

Dr. Emily Lovell

Dr. Emily Lovell works on “Strengthening Underserved Segments of the Open Source Pipeline”. For more information, please see her website.

Eligibility/Requirements

A mentor who is a member of UC Santa Cruz faculty
Completion of Ph.D. (Ph.D. must be in hand at time of appointment)
Ph.D. dissertation or equivalent level of research that includes an innovative open source prototype (software or hardware)
Experience with teaching or mentoring undergraduates preferred
Experience with open source community management preferred

Timeline (current academic year)

Begin reviewing applications on March 15, 2022; positions open until filled

Fellowship Terms

Number of positions: three (3)
Resident fellowship based at UC Santa Cruz
Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience. Minimum annual salary rates are made based on the individual’s Experience Level, which is determined by the number of months of postdoctoral service at any institution. See current salary scale for Postdoctoral Titles at https://apo.ucsc.edu/compensation/salary-scales/index.html,
Anticipated start: as early as April 2022
Postdoctoral Scholar appointments are full-time; the initial appointment is for a minimum of one year, with the possibility of reappointment. Reappointment will be contingent upon positive performance review and availability of funding.

Application Structure

All applications should include:

Project Title
Background, overview & objectives
Expected time needed to meet objectives
Brief explanation of the relevant experience / previous work of project lead
Description of Diversity and Inclusion efforts/plans for project
Detail on the project roadmap and strategy for sustainability after fellowship ends
Risk assessment due to dependencies on any organization
Details related to project infrastructure and community engagement, including when applicable:
- Software project name and homepage URL
- Main code repository
- Documentation or other publication(s) describing project
- Name and affiliation of those with commit rights to the code repositories
- Names and affiliations of other maintainers/contributors
- Open source license
- Primary main programming language and other relevant language(s)
- List of scholarly papers citing or mentioning the software project
- Current number of unique users/contributors
- Number of software projects that depend on the software project
- Estimate of the potential number of users who could adopt this software project
- List of upstream, downstream, or related software projects that you are contributing to or receiving contributions from.
- Provide links to:
  - End-user documentation
  - Issue tracker
  - Community engagement or on-boarding forum
  - Contribution/coding guidelines

Other Application Material to be included in proposal:

CV of postdoctoral applicant

Register: 2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 11:22:07 -0700

The UC Open Source Research Symposium (successor to the CROSS Research Symposia series) is happy to be able to mix in-person, hybrid and fully remote activities in an effort to provide a larger audience the opportunity to learn about open source research at the University of California. Participants can interact with UC faculty, graduate students, and affiliated researchers, and discuss future directions and discover areas of collaboration from campuses throughout the UC system.

Returning after a two year hiatus, the Symposium will once again include the annual UC Santa Cruz Systems Research Lab’s Oktoberfest barbeque on the evening of the first day of the symposium.

Symposium Details →

🎓 Open Source Education

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 12:23:07 -0700

2022 Open Source Seminar Series at UC Santa Cruz

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a past event. If you are interested in finding out more about future events like this, please contact Stephanie Lieggi.

The OSPO UC Santa Cruz and CROSS are pleased to be hosting a Summer seminar series for our affiliated researchers, students and industry partners facilitated by Dr. Dirk Riehle, Professor of Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. The series will include four multi-session modules (12 sessions in total).

Module 1: Open source licenses (July 5, 6, 7)
Module 2: Open source audits (July 11, 12, 14)
Module 3: License-compliant distribution (July 18, 20, 21)
Module 4: Open source program office (July 25, 27, 28)

All sessions last approximately one hour and begin at 8am Pacific Time. See specific dates for all sessions below.

Module 1: Open source licenses

Participants learn about open source software and how to interpret its licenses.

This module covers the following topics over the course of three sessions of 1h each:

July 5 (Tuesday): Free/libre, and open-source software licenses
July 6 (Wednesday): The copyleft obligation
July 7 (Thursday): The state of open source licensing

Module 2: Open source audits

Participants learn how to create a bill of materials and audit open source software.

This module covers the following topics over the course of three sessions of 1h each:

July 11 (Monday): Software bill of materials
July 12 (Tuesday): Software composition analysis
July 14 (Thursday): Open source legal risks

Module 3: License-compliant distribution

Participants learn how to deliver products built on open source to third parties.

This module covers the following topics over the course of three sessions of 1h each:

July 18 (Monday): Standardized license interpretation
July 20 (Wednesday): License-compliant distribution
July 21 (Thursday): Continuous integration

Module 4: The open source program office

Participants learn how to set up and operate an open source program office.

This module covers the following topics over the course of three sessions of 1h each:

July 25 (Monday): The open source program office
July 27 (Wednesday): Securing the software supply chain
July 28 (Thursday): University open source program office (Carlos Maltzahn & Stephanie Lieggi)

About the Facilitator: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, M.B.A., is the Professor of Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before joining academia, Riehle led the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs, LLC, in Palo Alto, California (Silicon Valley). He works on open source and inner source software engineering as well as agile software development methods and continuous delivery. Prof. Riehle holds a Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zürich and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He welcomes email at dirk@riehle.org, blogs at https://dirkriehle.com, and tweets as @dirkriehle.

2021 CROSS Research Symposium

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Go to Event

2021 Commercial Open Source Start Up Workshop Series (hosted by CROSS)

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

2020 CROSS Research Symposium

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Go to Event

2020 Commercial Open Source Workshop Series (hosted by CROSS)

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2019 CROSS Research Symposium

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Go to Event

2018 CROSS Research Symposium

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Go to Event

2017 CROSS Research Symposium

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Go to Event

2016 CROSS Research Symposium

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Go to Event

Guidelines for Summer Students

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

AI USAGE POLICY

How to apply to the be a contributor in our summer programs

Take a look at the current year’s project ideas and refer to the timeline for exact dates.
Between late February and mid March, select projects of interest, contact mentor(s), and tell them your motivation and provide them with your relevant background/experience. You are strongly encouraged to apply to no more than two projects.
Join the slack channel for contributor applicants. You should contact the Organization Admins for access. Note that we will only review proposals of contributors who have also joined our slack channel by the deadline stated on the timeline. Use this time to also get to know the project to which you are applying and the members of the project community. You are highly encouraged to ask questions.
Be prepared to provide mentors with some examples of your technical knowledge as an initial step. For instance, mentors may ask you to carry out a technical test or show work you have done in the past to assess your knowledge. This is an important step for ensuring you are proposing something that is beneficial to you, the mentor and the community. We have opportunities for contributors with a wide range of skill levels, so do not worry about “passing” the test - just show what your skill levels are and areas you are interested to grow in.
Once you and the mentor have established your level of proficiency and how it fits within project ideas, you may receive feedback from the mentor on writing the proposal. Each mentor or mentor team will establish their own process for reviewing and commenting on the work of interested students. Note – DO NOT RELY ON AI TOOLS for your proposal writing or showing your competence. Mentors need to see your work in order to judge if you are a good fit and will be successful in your project. While you can utilize tools to refine you project if necessary YOU WILL BE EXPECTED TO BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN ANY AND ALL WORK THAT YOU PRESENT TO THE MENTORS and the application text must be your origianal work. We prohibit the use of AI tools for generating your project deliverables. Misuse of AI tools will be grounds from removal from the program.
Keep track of that year’s project deadlines. Proposal must be turned in on time and include:
- A detailed plan of work with an estimate of the time needed (typically 175 or 375 hours in total). See below for a suggested template.
- Well defined tasks and their objectives, list of deliverables
- Note: any committments that could impact the amount of time you can spend on the project.
- Submit via the GSoC portal
Mentors will provide a ranked list of proposals to Org Admins. Results are made public in early May.

IMPORTANT REQUIREMENT FOR ALL ACCEPTED PROPOSALS

Summer contributors will be required to provide short bi-weekly status updates. These will help the mentors and the Org Admins see that your project is on track. They are also meant to provide a basis for blog posts to be completed by the contributors and highlighted by the organization admins.

Mentors and Org Admins expect summer contributors to act professionally and respect the mentor’s time and efforts. As with any professional setting, it is the responsibility of the contributor/student to inform their mentor if they will be taking any vacations or if they have any other obligation that conflicts with the proposed workplan. Not informing the mentor of these conflicts can result in removal from the program.

Contributors will be expected to attend all-hands and other group meetings throughout the program. These meetings will be via zoom and held at various times of day to allow participation for a wide range of time zones.

Do not hesitate to contact Org Admins for further questions.

Suggested proposal template

In your proposal, be specific and make sure your mentor can see evidence that you will be able to succeed at your project.

Proposal title - Should give an indication of what your proposal is expecting to accomplish
Name of project mentor(s)
Contributor’s full name
Slack and github handles
Introduction
- Define the problem you are trying to solve
- Provide background about the current state of the problem
- Descrbe you solution
Project goals
- Project objectives: What do you expect to get from this project? How will the community benefit?
- Expected deliverables: What do you think the results will be from this proposal?
- Future work based on project (if applicable)
Implementation plan
- Project methodology: How will you work to meet your objectives? How will you interact with the mentor and other members of the relevant open source community?
- Describe the project’s technical elements
- Describe any challenges and proposed solutions
Project timeline
- Project plan and deliverables schedule.
- Total number of hours expected to need for project and number of weeks to complete.
- IMPORTANT – the timeline must specify any time conflicts that you anticipate during the program (ie conflicts due to travel, school, other activities.)
Biographical information
- Relevant experience and educational background
- Technical interests and strengths
- Contact information:
  - Required: your full name, email address, current affiliation (for instance, which school are you currently attending);
  - Required: Timezone you will reside in during program;
  - Optional: relevant blog or website URL; Linkedin profile; other social media links.

Carlos Maltzahn | UCSC OSPO

Writing a blog about your OSRE 2025 project

Making a pull request for your blog

Example frontmatter and text body

Writing a blog about your OSRE 2026 project

Making a pull request for your blog

Example frontmatter and text body

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Example frontmatter and text body

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Writing a blog about your OSRE 2023 project

Size and content

Making a pull request for your blog

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