Calling all academic coders! We need your views on open source in academia 

• Survey: https://southampton.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aXYKOkmKdvzbRiu
• Time: Approx 20 mins.
• Deadline: 30 September 2025
• Target audience: Open to anyone in academia, anywhere in the world

In research, we depend on open source software daily, whether that's data analysis libraries, high performancing computing, specialist imaging frameworks, or out of sight in the stacks, but academic structures often don't recognise or support the maintenance work these tools rely on, despite increasing awareness of its importance and efforts to fund open source scientific software.

With the new UKRI software policy around the corner, it's never been more important to have a frank discussion about how to encourage, recognise, and promote both the use and maintenance of open source software in ways that benefit both individuals and the whole community.

This is why, as part of her SSI 2025 Fellowship, Arielle Bennett is running a survey to gather views from across the community, whether you are a casual contributor, a core project member, or someone who has never interacted with an open source project before. I want to explore what motivates, or blocks people from contributing to open source software projects and how we can improve participation in the future.

Who should respond: No prior experience contributing to open source required! Researchers, students, research software engineers, academic IT professionals, librarians, data professionals, and anyone interested in strengthening the relationship between academia and open source.

How it'll be used: Findings from this survey will be used in a policy briefing to help advocate for national policies which address common barriers at a structural level, and to develop practical recommendations for improving open source contribution levels across academia. Keep an eye out for a workshop at RSEcon 2025 if you'd like to explore this topic in more depth.

The survey will be open until 30 September 2025 and is open to researchers and research professionals anywhere in the world. 

Interested in discussing more? Questions? Contact Arielle Bennett 

The illustration is created by Scriberia with The Turing Way community. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807

The first cycle of the Open Innovation Sprints has started. This programme aims to produce actionable, community-driven outputs designed to tackle shared ecosystem-level challenges in open source and open science. These sprints are collaborative, fast-paced initiatives bringing together researchers, engineers, designers, community organizers, and users over a six to nine month period. By the end of each sprint, participants release open source solutions, supporting documentation, and sustainability plans, all ready for immediate contributions from the wider community.

The Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) has recently announced the launch of a new project named Birdaro, aimed at supporting open source software (OSS) projects as they consider scaling and plans for long-term sustainability. The project has received funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The Birdaro project will focus on addressing common, predominantly human infrastructure-related challenges faced by open-source projects as they consider whether to scale. Specifically, it will concentrate on individuals taking on leadership roles within these projects. This initiative comes in response to the increasing importance of OSS products within STEM research and the growing need for support in ensuring the longer-term persistence of these projects.

CSCCE has been researching and developing materials about the challenges of scaling and sustainability in OSS that specifically relate to “human infrastructure” topics, such as community engagement, governance, the definition of roles and leadership pathways, and where projects end up being hosted.

The project aims to conduct further research in this area, create and share new resources, and develop a training program for open source project leaders. It is distinct from CSCCE but draws on the organization's expertise in human infrastructure.

"Birdaro" draws its name from the constructed international language of Esperanto, where it means flock of birds. This name is chosen to symbolize a collaborative effort where multiple individuals work towards a shared vision, similar to the collective movement of a murmuration of starlings.

If you would like to stay up to date with work on the Birdaro project, you can sign up today for the mailing list.

If you are interested in connecting with the Birdaro team to talk more about the project, get in touch at info@birdaro.org.

Have you developed something useful, and want to build a community around it? Before you encourage people to find you and your project, you need to make both easily findable. It is not hard, but surprisingly many miss or disregard this crucial initial step. You also need to figure out what type of people you want to find, and where they currently are.

You've written some software as part of your research, and you would like others to be able to use it. You've made sure your code is ready for release so there's only one thing left to do: choose a licence.