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Melissa Weber Mendonça

Open Source for Open Science

pyOpenSci Fall Festival 2024

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Why am I here?

  • PhD in Applied Math�(Numerical Optimization)
  • Professor at UFSC, Brazil�(2010-2019)

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Why am I here?

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Why am I here?

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From math…

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Free Software

Open Source

    • Source is available
    • Source is available
    • Copyleft licenses*
    • Restrictive requirements
    • Permissive licenses
    • FSF
    • OSI

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Open source as my day job

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Why do we call it an “ecosystem”

Harris, C.R., Millman, K.J., van der Walt, S.J. et al. Array programming with NumPy. Nature 585, 357–362 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2

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Project + Volunteers = Community

Python Brasil 2019

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Volunteer contributors

New shiny features

Maintenance

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Organize and clearly communicate plans

Roadmaps

Signal contribution opportunities

Identify funding opportunities

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Governance and decision-making processes

Communities can be organized in various ways:

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    • BDFL
    • Steering council
    • Voting
    • Lazy consensus

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Governance and decision-making processes

Maintainers

Downstream

Corporate

Users

Contributors

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Source: https://www.cscce.org/

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Why do we call it an “ecosystem”

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Open Science

Pillars of Open Science, UNESCO (2021)

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Transparency

    • Science should be transparent, and sharing information about scientific research should be the norm

Accessibility

    • Scientific information should be free*, accessible, and allow for fair and independent investigation

Reproducibility

    • Data and methods needed to reproduce experiments and reach scientific conclusions should be available

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Tensions

  • Academia vs. volunteers
  • How to support a variety of stakeholders with different objectives and demands
  • How to ensure high-quality with little support for maintenance

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Sustainability

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  • Documentation
  • Onboarding new contributors
  • Communications and outreach
  • Healthy leadership

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Diversity

  • Who gets to contribute?
  • Cultural, language barriers
  • Accessibility
  • Credit

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Grants

Direct/in-kind support

Individual fellowship/awards

    • Support for project vision
    • Usually short-term
    • Can be long-term
    • Depends on company strategy
    • Hard to plan around
    • Support for maintenance

Donations

Feature development

Support contracts

    • Oscillates
    • Support for maintenance
    • Focus on new features
    • Needs well-scoped roadmap
    • Depends on company strategy
    • Support for new, targeted features

Funding

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Funding

  • Paid vs. volunteer labor
  • Invisible labor
  • What do we expect from maintainers?

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Open Source for Open Science

Open access

Open standards

Open source

Open data

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Contact

Email

melissawm@gmail.com

Social Media

https://pynews.com.br/@melissawm

https://github.com/melissawm

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