A new $484,455 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will support the next phase of the University of California Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Network as they work to make OSPOs a permanent part of the UC system. With this new funding, the UC Santa Barbara Library’s Open Source Program (OSP) will continue to develop and deploy initiatives that raise awareness and support for open source software and hardware at UCSB.
Since 2019, OSPOs have begun to be established at universities across the country, facilitating engagement between open source creators and students, administrators, and the public. The Sloan Foundation funded the launch of the OSPO at UC Santa Cruz in 2022, and in 2024 a $1.85 million grant established the UC OSPO Network, extending the model to partners at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. Recently, the Network has expanded to include two additional campuses: UCSF and UC Law SF (formerly UC Hastings).
The UCSB OSP, led by the UCSB Library, has spent the past two years developing community resources for campus creators. This includes hosting educational workshops related to open source, including one workshop at SB Hacks, UCSB’s annual student-run hackathon. The UCSB OSP also spearheaded a recently-published survey of UC open source contributors that has been a key tool for guiding OSPO Network strategy. The UCSB Open Source Meetup has reached a total of 65 attendees, and the Open Source Lounge has been attended by undergraduates, graduate students, and staff seeking a co-working space to work toward their open source goals. Currently, the UCSB OSP is leading the development of a handbook on open source sustainability at UC, which will feature interviews from UC open source creators.
The UCSB OSP’s plans for the coming year include expanding existing services and leveraging inter-campus collaboration. The OSP will solicit greater engagement with students in quarterly evening pizza nights; will have a larger presence at SB Hacks; will merge its meetup into a newly revitalized all-campus virtual meetup; and will play a greater role in stewarding the nascent UC Open Repository Browser, a toolkit for building institutional software catalogs.
As part of the continued effort to formalize the UC OSPO Network as a permanent institution at UC, the UC OSPO Network has developed a new governance structure that includes working groups, which will be open to public volunteers and will be listed on ucospo.net soon. But no need to wait–you can attend an all-campus virtual meetup or start chatting with the Network on Slack to join the community today.
