Seven years ago, assistant professor of computer science and engineering Carlos Maltzahn founded UC Santa Cruz Free Software Research Center (CROSS) to youTeach students to be productive in open source communities, fund students working on research with a plausible path to becoming a successful open source project, and award fellowships to postdocs to grow open source communities around their research products .
Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Maltzahn and CROSS Executive Director Stephanie Lieggi a grant during their first Ways to enable open source ecosystems (POSE) to fund organizations to create the supporting infrastructure necessary for open-source research products to become stand-alone projects with growing communities of users and contributors – providing a valuable continuation for projects initiated at CROSS.
“It’s one of those things where you work for years on something a little crazy and a lot of people are like, ‘Why would you do that?’ said Maltzahn, “And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself in this incredible center of opportunity.”
Full-time students often find that their academic milestones can make it impossible to manage and maintain open source projects, and many promising research prototypes are abandoned. This grant, referred to as a “Phase I” proposal in the POSE program, will enable Maltzahn and Lieggi to develop a plan to recruit software engineering research personnel capable, in the academic context, of establishing and maintaining the infrastructure of support necessary for open source projects to flourish.
The grant funding will specifically support the success of the Skyhook Data Management project, a data storage solution originally pioneered by CROSS Incubator Fellow Jeff LeFevre and currently led by a PhD in computer science and engineering. student Jayjeet Chakraborty. Skyhook was recently integrated with Apache Arrowan industry-leading open-source ecosystem for accessing, processing, and communicating large, table-based datasets.
“Turning Skyhook into a healthy open-source project will increase the impact of all the research that has gone into it,” Maltzahn said. “Phase I funding allows us to determine how to create a sustainable model for paying staff in the university context and making this position attractive as a career path.
The new grant will fund a series of workshops to examine methodologies and models for building a sustainable open source support infrastructure around Skyhook. Research Software Engineers will be responsible for bringing industry-level open source practices into Skyhook to ensure high software quality and a compelling experience for users and contributors. They would also be in charge of the community management aspects of the open source project – mentoring contributors, answering questions, providing documentation, managing events, etc.
Maltzahn and Lieggi will work with several organizations with years of experience managing open source ecosystems to develop their staff retention plan, such as the Digital Impact Alliancea United Nations foundation, as well as Apache Software Foundation and NUMfocus. This will place the team in an excellent position to respond to the POSE Program Phase II funding opportunity which, if granted, would allow them to implement this plan and hire research software engineers to manage long-term open source project support infrastructure.
