Recap: Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise
It was both a privilege and a joy to take part in the Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise workshop, organized by Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The focus of this project was to help better harness the power of open source software (OSS) for open science and technological innovation by improving the resiliency and sustainability of open ecosystems within higher education. One persistent challenge is that OSS practitioners and advocates in higher education, notably the academic and administrative OSS communities and those communities organized around research OSS, are too often disconnected from each other. This disconnection hinders the development of an OSS framework and vision encompassing universities’ teaching and research missions that would lay the foundation for greater sustainability and use of OSS in the research enterprise.
Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation invited ~40 stakeholders to an in-person workshop to identify actionable pathways that researchers and universities can take to build a robust OSS infrastructure (i.e., people, principles, processes, services, and technology) capable of supporting and sustaining universities’ strategic goals related to research OSS.
I was especially honored to moderate the opening plenary session, OSS Sustainability in Context, The goal here was to put some key concepts and metrics on the table to help frame the day and begin articulating success factors that are common to all OSS projects and communities and provide perspectives on sustainability drawing on insights from experts in nonprofit, academic, and private sectors. And did we have some experts:
Cat Allman – A longtime advocate for open source in education and research, Cat has worked with Google’s Open Source Programs Office, Google Summer of Code and Science Foo Camp, contributing to numerous initiatives that connect developers, researchers, and educators worldwide. Her work has helped bridge gaps between communities and foster long-term sustainability strategies for open source projects.
Karmen Čondić-Jurkić – Co‑founder and Executive Director of the Open Molecular Software Foundation. With a background in computational chemistry, Dr. Čondić-Jurkić champions open science infrastructure—building collaborative, sustainable, and accessible ecosystems for molecular sciences. Her leadership addresses governance, community building, and strategic development of open source research tools.
Clare Dillon – Clare is a prominent InnerSource and open source advocate, currently contributing as a researcher at the University of Galway with Lero’s OSPO team, and serving as community lead for CURIOSS, a network for university and research institution OSPOs. From 2021 to 2023, she was the Executive Director of InnerSource Commons Foundation, guiding one of the largest communities of InnerSource practitioners.
Allison Randal – Dr. Randal is a renowned open source software developer and strategist. She currently serves as Chair of the Board at the Software Freedom Conservancy, Vice‑Chair (and board member) of the OpenInfra Foundation, and is a board member of the LLVM Foundation, CHERI Alliance, and the FLOSS Foundations leadership group. She’s held leadership positions across major foundations—Open Source Initiative (OSI) and The Perl Foundation—and contributed to foundational projects such as the Parrot virtual machine, Ubuntu, Debian, RISC‑V, and more.
Our panelists' deep expertise—spanning nonprofit, academic, research, and industry contexts—set a thoughtful and energizing tone for the day (What is Q-tip software?). Each brought not only insights into the challenges and opportunities of sustaining open source in higher education but also stories that motivated participants to think bigger, act collaboratively, and push for practical, sustainable change.
Throughout the day’s breakouts and lightning sessions, several themes stood out for me:
First, Cultivating Communities of Practice: I was reminded that creating a community starts the moment a project begins. Waiting until “later” risks missing the chance to build relationships with those vital first adopters who often become the champions that help the project grow.
Second, Identifying and Engaging Contributors: This is a two-lane road. One lane is social—community building, creating a culture, and constant communications to foster affinity and engagement—and the other is technical—harvesting repository data, scanning ports to identify adopting institutions, centralizing services to create collaboration hubs. The community lane should open from day one, while the technical lane pays its biggest dividends as the project matures. A successful project needs both.
Third, Support Structures: It doesn’t really matter what you call the support structure or where it is located—an on-campus OSPO, a non-profit foundation, the library, or a corporate partner. What matters is how deeply your supporting organization is connected: across disciplines and departments on campus, with other institutions in higher education, with peer open source projects and foundations, and with external networks in government, industry, and beyond.
One question lingered for me: in this re-emergence of open source activity on campuses, are we fully building on the roads traveled by earlier initiatives—not just successful campus-based open source projects, but also the broader open movements such as open educational resources, open access publishing, and open content? The history is rich, and the lessons learned could help us avoid reinventing the wheel.
There were many more discussions, ideas, and takeaways than I can't fit in here, so I am excited to share that the findings from the workshop will be shared broadly via a "Practical Guide for Sustaining OSS in the Research Enterprise,” to be released under a CC-BY license, so watch this space.
A heartfelt thanks to our colleagues at Ithaka for their masterful organization—Chelsea McCracken, Dylan Ruediger, and Mark McBride—as well as Apereo's Jenn Cummings, CMP and Joshua Baron for all their help. I was also thrilled Apereo Board Members Stephanie Lieggi and Angela Newell, MSPPM, PhD could also join us for the day.
The conversations sparked here will, I believe, ripple outward to strengthen the role of open source in the research enterprise for years to come. Thank you to all of our participants and contributors: Nathan Alexander, Chris Aniszczyk, Katherine Brown, Scott Collard, Karl Fogel, Megan Forbes Andrew Fullard, Josh Greenberg, Kate Hertweck, Muhammad Hossain, Samir Iqbal, Ashwathi Iyer, Daniel S. Katz, Georg Link, PhD, Zi-Kui Liu, John Meluso, Rosalyn Metz, David Millman, Devora Najjar, Ph.D., Duane Nykamp, Jason Paluck, Kimberly Ray, Nathan Swain, Dr. Hector N Torres, Elizabeth Vu, Greg Watson and Edward Zarecor.