Daniel S. Katz

I'm happy to announce that I've started a project with
[rOpenSci](https://ropensci.org)under [their recent award from the
Helmsley Foundation](/blog/2015/11/19/helmsley-trust-funding/).

My work with rOpenSci will focus on sustainability of the project
itself. Sustainability can be defined as having theresources to do the
necessary work to continue and grow rOpenSci. This is one of the most
difficult challenges forrOpenSci and for many other research software
projects.

rOpenSci has a very broad and very ambitious goal, as stated on their
web site, "Transforming science through open data."In practice, the work
being done by rOpenSci is "creating packages that allow access to data
repositories through theR statistical programming environment" with
tools that "not only facilitate drawing data into an environment where
itcan readily be manipulated, but also one in which those analyses and
methods can be easily shared, replicated, andextended by other
researchers."An interesting question is how much rOpenSci will choose to
move beyond R to meet its goal, which I would encourage asmuch as
possible. I actually might rephrase the goal as "Transforming science
through open data and open software"better matching what is now
happening in the project while not calling out R, since I would prefer
to try to affectthe non-R science community as well.

## Sustainability = Resources \> Work

There are a variety of sustainability models that have worked for other
open source projectsto bring in the resources needed to do the work,such
as institutional support, diversified grants, membership fees, donations
and gifts, fees for services, volunteers,etc. With the rOpenSci team, I
will test elements of these models for rOpenSci. As part of this, I will
also workwith the rOpenSci leadership team to identify new funding
opportunities for rOpenSci from public and private fundingorganizations.

I will discuss and document how other projects have increased their
scale of impact without an equivalentincrease in their staff, and how
these models could work for rOpenSci. I and the rOpenSci team will then
test elementsof one or more of these activities. I will also seek to
find new partnership opportunities for rOpenSci with
academic,government, and private organizations.

Sustainability is a key challenge for many academic open source
projects, as I saw when I was leading NSF's [SI2
program](http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=504817). One of
the review criteria for proposalsto this program was to describe the
proposed sustainability plan. Few proposers gave fully convincing
plans,and the most common was probably to have a diverse set of funding
sources. Additionally, many projectsdecided that they would leave
sustainability until near the end of the project. While we don't know
whatwill lead to sustainability for academic open source software,it
seems clear that waiting to address it is not likely to make the
effortmore successful.

If we can solve this for rOpenSci, or even just make progress andprovide
guidance for other projects about what might work and whatprobably
won't, this will be a significant contribution.The
[WSSSPE](http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/) events will be a way
to bring togethersome of the academic open source community to
understand how our lessons apply to otherprojects.

## Promoting Open Source

The last part of this work with rOpenSci, which overlaps some of my
other work, involves ideas about how to develop theoverall scientific
software community.Working with the rOpenSci project and the wider
scientific software community, I will examine incentives,citation/credit
models, and metrics, including understanding contributions of people in
teams; funding models;multi-disciplinary science; career paths for
software developers and scientists who also develop some
software;software engineering; software communities and sociology;
training and education; software dissemination, publication,and peer
review; catalogs, search, and review; portability; and reproducibility.
At least some of this will be doneunder the
[WSSSPE](http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/) umbrella.

I will also work with rOpenSci to attempt to promote and encourage
softwaremetrics. A number of projects, including
[sempervirens](https://github.com/njsmith/sempervirens)
and[Depsy](http://depsy.org), have begun to focus on particular parts of
the problem space, but more general work andtools are needed, in
particular to impact those outside of just the R and python communities.
There's also somerelated work underway at NCSA and RENCI (that came out
of WSSSPE3) to survey a set of developers on what impactmetrics they
find useful, and I think the results of the survey will also help this
overall community.

## The Culture around Open Source Needs Improvement

Finally, I want to try to change our cultural understanding around the
idea of opensource software. The fact that open source software is
commonly viewed as free software is a problem, since to manypeople, free
means of no value. In particular, I believe we need to try to get to the
point where companies thatmake heavy use of open source software feel
that they have an obligation to support either the software or
itsdevelopers in some way. This is part of the larger sustainability
discussion, since this is the way that opensource projects can gain more
resources and reduce the amount of work that they have to do internally.

Any thoughts, comments, or suggestions are welcome.


I’m happy to announce that I’ve started a project with rOpenSciunder their recent award from the Helmsley Foundation. My work with rOpenSci will focus on sustainability of the project itself. Sustainability can be defined as having theresources to do the necessary work to continue and grow rOpenSci. This is one of the most difficult challenges forrOpenSci and for many other research software projects.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

Software sustainability research with rOpenSci