Business case #81
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Co-authored-by: David Perez-Suarez <d.perez-suarez@ucl.ac.uk>
samcunliffe
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Hi David and all, great start!
I have added a few comments. Happy to read it again.
Thanks, Miguel
ospo/business-case.md
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| > context for your project, explaining the problem that it's meant to solve and how it aligns with the organisation's vision and strategic plan | ||
| UCL has a long history of open-source software development for research and open-source educational materials. |
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long sounds vague, can we add the 1997 year or the number of years from the first open-source software projects?
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Here, I disagree. The introduction is necessarily a summary. The study will be mentioned several times later with details, and probably we'll add it as an appendix.
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Although might also be worth considering that UCL OSS will go back way before 1997 I imagine, it's just harder to discover details now! In the 1950s all academic source code was basically OSS...
ospo/business-case.md
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| - Design based on surveys run by other universities | ||
| - Users ([University of Wisconsin Madison results][uw-survey]), contributors ([University of California results][uc-survey]) | ||
| - Publish a guidance on how to release open source outcomes within UCL | ||
| - Including license, development models, community engagement, and commercial opportunities |
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I think commercial opportunities or Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) is a topic for itself. We have seen the need on selection of licensing for software, for instance dual-licencing is something I have been advocating to maintain community using open-source and academic licences and close source licences to protected ideas that could provide economical value.
In this blog, Matthieu Lavergne is talking about Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) and addressed this questions How challenging is the financing journey for COSS startups? Do COSS companies deliver superior exits?
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I think this should be reviewed and merged to
I disagree with this way of working. |
Co-authored-by: Sam Cunliffe <samcunliffe@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Sam Cunliffe <samcunliffe@users.noreply.github.com>
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Various thoughts from me on an initial read-through, and some proof reading.
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What's not obvious in this diagram, although perhaps it is in the text (it could come under advocacy for instance) is promoting the use of OSS within universities, both on the 'business' side as well as for research & teaching. The emphasis here seems to be more on OSS development. (Of course, if you're using it, hopefully you're also contributing back!)
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| # UCL's Open Source Programme Office | ||
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| *Executive Summary* |
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Should this have a proper heading style? I'm guessing it'll be written at the end?
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yes, styling will be done at the end.
ospo/business-case.md
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| > context for your project, explaining the problem that it's meant to solve and how it aligns with the organisation's vision and strategic plan | ||
| UCL has a long history of open-source software development for research and open-source educational materials. |
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Although might also be worth considering that UCL OSS will go back way before 1997 I imagine, it's just harder to discover details now! In the 1950s all academic source code was basically OSS...
ospo/business-case.md
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| - community | ||
| - Ease collaboration with different institutions for similar tasks (from research software to infrastructure) | ||
| - policy | ||
| - Include Open Source solutions and technical sovereignty into UCL procurement, |
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I'm not sure about the 'sovereignty' term when applied to an institution rather than a country. We don't have a king of UCL ;)
Is this commonly used in non-OSPO contexts too?
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Yes, it's a common term used a lot. I've added a footnote to add an explanation.
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| *mission statement* | ||
| > You’ll need to define your project vision, goals and objectives. |
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We also need to reflect the viewpoint of people like Will Greenly here, not just the research perspective.
Co-authored-by: Jonathan Cooper <github.com@jonc.me.uk>
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Looks good. The only thing that seems missing to me is some kind of overarching strong argument to senior leadership at UCL who may not know/care about software. I think their could be an emphasis on "other organisations are doing this, don't want to get left behind", "maintaining our leadership position within UK academia", "OSS is the future" etc.
| whether it's software, hardware, data or other resources as research and educational outputs. | ||
| Open source software is everywhere and it has a huge economic impact. | ||
| The [State of Open Source paper][sospaper], shows that 96% of all software included open source software. | ||
| Moreover, a [study from the Harvard Business School][harvard-oss] has shown recently that open source software generated $8.8 trillion of value and production costs are reduced a factor of 3.5. |
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| Moreover, a [study from the Harvard Business School][harvard-oss] has shown recently that open source software generated $8.8 trillion of value and production costs are reduced a factor of 3.5. | |
| Moreover, a [study from the Harvard Business School][harvard-oss] has shown recently that open source software generated $8.8 trillion of value and production costs are reduced by a factor of 3.5. |
| --> | ||
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| ## What is an OSPO? | ||
| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on Open Source, |
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| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on Open Source, | |
| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on open source, |
| with costs shared across different departments across UCL, | ||
| starting with the current 0.25 FTE provided by ARC and increase it to a shared 3 FTE across the university at the end of this period. | ||
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| Being the first UK university to have an OSPO provides a service no available in the country to our researchers, staff and students, |
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| Being the first UK university to have an OSPO provides a service no available in the country to our researchers, staff and students, | |
| Being the first UK university to have an OSPO provides a service not available in the country to our researchers, staff and students, |
| UCL has a long history of open-source software development for research and open-source educational resources. | ||
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| In a recent study, we identified more than a thousand open-source software projects owned[^owned] by the UCL community that are directly related to UCL research, publications, or teaching on the GitHub platform. | ||
| The oldest[^oldest] of these projects dates back to 1997, notably before the invention of git itself[^?Do people know what's git], and is still one of our most active projects today. |
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Do people know what's git
IMO, most people don't.
| The oldest[^oldest] of these projects dates back to 1997, notably before the invention of git itself[^?Do people know what's git], and is still one of our most active projects today. | ||
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| We know that UCL has given birth to open source communities such as the [Open Street Map][osm][^osmap-ucl], which was supported and hosted by UCL from 2004 when it was created, to at least 2008. This platform has been providing open-source licensed map data free to use, to edit and distribute, to everyone, being used by lots of mapping applications, transport companies, government agencies, humanitarian organisations, news sites and websites[^osm-companies]. | ||
| A more recent example is the [BrainGlobe Initiative][bgi] that was established between researches at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the Technical University of Munich since 2XXX(FIXME). They have developed a whole ecosystem of research software tools and nurture a community of researcher over the years, that was, last year, recognised by receiving an international award for its contribution to open, accessible and collaborative neuroscience[^bgi-award]. |
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| A more recent example is the [BrainGlobe Initiative][bgi] that was established between researches at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the Technical University of Munich since 2XXX(FIXME). They have developed a whole ecosystem of research software tools and nurture a community of researcher over the years, that was, last year, recognised by receiving an international award for its contribution to open, accessible and collaborative neuroscience[^bgi-award]. | |
| A more recent example is the [BrainGlobe Initiative][bgi] that was established between researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the Technical University of Munich in 2020. They have developed a whole ecosystem of research software tools and nurture a community of researcher over the years, that was, last year, recognised by receiving an international award for its contribution to open, accessible and collaborative neuroscience[^bgi-award]. |
| A major risk that an OSPO mitigates is a legal one. | ||
| One of the mandates of an OSPO is to develop an informed organisation-wide strategy for licensing open source projects and to provide guidance to developers and maintainers. | ||
| In our recent study, we noted 36.1% of UCL's open-source projects are unlicensed, meaning legally unusable by anyone. | ||
| While we also detected some projects violating licencing rules required. This could result on lawsuits and incur on costs. |
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| While we also detected some projects violating licencing rules required. This could result on lawsuits and incur on costs. | |
| While we also detected some projects violating licencing rules required. This could result in costly lawsuits. |
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| #### Year 2-3 | ||
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| Data scrapping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations on publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. |
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| Data scrapping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations on publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. | |
| Data scraping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations of publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. |
| This will require access to organisations and repositories we may not have at the moment and stakeholders will need to promote the need. | ||
| This is also an important security exercise and we expect ISD's Information Security Group to be involved. | ||
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| Develop and publish guidance on how to release open source outcomes (software, hardware, data, or educational resources) withing UCL. |
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| Develop and publish guidance on how to release open source outcomes (software, hardware, data, or educational resources) withing UCL. | |
| Develop and publish guidance on how to release open source outcomes (software, hardware, data, or educational resources) within UCL. |
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| We believe this could be done by contributions from other departments with a maximum of 1 FTE from ARC. | ||
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| Additionally, there will be costs required to participation on conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. |
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| Additionally, there will be costs required to participation on conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. | |
| Additionally, there will be costs required to participation at conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. |
| ARC supports this initiative, providing at the moment 0.2 FTE and funding the 4-week deployment of the open source metrics tool last year. | ||
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| <!-- Can any provide FTEs or financial support? --> | ||
| The Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Welcome Centre supports the OSPO and has developed an Open Source week workshop aligned with the OSPO objectives. |
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It's two weeks now :)
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| The Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Welcome Centre supports the OSPO and has developed an Open Source week workshop aligned with the OSPO objectives. | |
| The Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Welcome Centre supports the OSPO and has developed an open source summer school aligned with the OSPO objectives. |
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I've run out of time to continue today, but have tried to give a thorough proof-read to make this look professional for the committee.
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| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on Open Source, | ||
| whether it's software, hardware, data or other resources as research and educational outputs. |
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| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on Open Source, | |
| whether it's software, hardware, data or other resources as research and educational outputs. | |
| Our university, as with many institutions and organisations around the globe, depends on open source, | |
| whether that is software, hardware, data, or other resources such as research and educational outputs. |
| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on Open Source, | ||
| whether it's software, hardware, data or other resources as research and educational outputs. | ||
| Open source software is everywhere and it has a huge economic impact. | ||
| The [State of Open Source paper][sospaper], shows that 96% of all software included open source software. |
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| The [State of Open Source paper][sospaper], shows that 96% of all software included open source software. | |
| The [State of Open Source paper][sospaper] shows that 96% of all software included open source software components. |
| whether it's software, hardware, data or other resources as research and educational outputs. | ||
| Open source software is everywhere and it has a huge economic impact. | ||
| The [State of Open Source paper][sospaper], shows that 96% of all software included open source software. | ||
| Moreover, a [study from the Harvard Business School][harvard-oss] has shown recently that open source software generated $8.8 trillion of value and production costs are reduced a factor of 3.5. |
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Generated over what period? Production costs of what?
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| Other open source "products" haven't been under such a detailed analysis yet, however, from the point of view of an university, | ||
| they are still very important, for example for the Open Science reproducibility mission as well as for the creation of Open Educational resources. |
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| Other open source "products" haven't been under such a detailed analysis yet, however, from the point of view of an university, | |
| they are still very important, for example for the Open Science reproducibility mission as well as for the creation of Open Educational resources. | |
| Open source "products" apart from software haven't been analysed in such detail yet. | |
| However, from the point of view of an university they are still very important, for example for the Open Science reproducibility mission as well as for the creation of Open Educational resources. |
| Other open source "products" haven't been under such a detailed analysis yet, however, from the point of view of an university, | ||
| they are still very important, for example for the Open Science reproducibility mission as well as for the creation of Open Educational resources. | ||
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| The creation of an Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) helps to coordinate its usage and development as well as to nurture its adoption across the university. |
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| The creation of an Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) helps to coordinate its usage and development as well as to nurture its adoption across the university. | |
| An Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) will coordinate the usage and development of open source, as well as nurturing its adoption across the university. |
| #### Year 2-3 | ||
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| Data scrapping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations on publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. | ||
| Additionally, the same analysis will be done on closed software developed within UCL. This will highlight risks and needs of that closed source software while encourage inner source[^innersource] practices within UCL. |
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| Additionally, the same analysis will be done on closed software developed within UCL. This will highlight risks and needs of that closed source software while encourage inner source[^innersource] practices within UCL. | |
| Additionally, the same analysis will be done on closed software developed within UCL. This will highlight risks and needs of that closed source software while encouraging inner source[^innersource] practices within UCL. |
| This will require access to organisations and repositories we may not have at the moment and stakeholders will need to promote the need. | ||
| This is also an important security exercise and we expect ISD's Information Security Group to be involved. | ||
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| Develop and publish guidance on how to release open source outcomes (software, hardware, data, or educational resources) withing UCL. |
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| Develop and publish guidance on how to release open source outcomes (software, hardware, data, or educational resources) withing UCL. | |
| Guidance will be published on how to release open source outcomes (software, hardware, data, or educational resources) within UCL. |
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| Including licenses, development models, community engagement, and commercial opportunities. | ||
| This will need to involve the Library, ARC, Computer Science, Arena, ISD DigiEd, Innovation & Enterprise, UCLB, UCLC and Institute of Making. |
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| Including licenses, development models, community engagement, and commercial opportunities. | |
| This will need to involve the Library, ARC, Computer Science, Arena, ISD DigiEd, Innovation & Enterprise, UCLB, UCLC and Institute of Making. | |
| This will cover licenses, development models, community engagement, and commercial opportunities, | |
| and hence involve stakeholders such as the Libraries, ARC, Computer Science, Arena, ISD, Innovation & Enterprise, UCLB, UCLC and the Institute of Making. |
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| Promote existing and develop new opportunities for students to collaborate with open source communities through out their degree. | ||
| We are aware of Computer Science modules and master programmes[^csprogs]. | ||
| Through those opportunities, students will be also interacting with various industries that are also open source users and contributors. | ||
| Though this may start with Computer Science students, it won't only be focused on STEM disciplines, but aimed to all programs. |
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| Promote existing and develop new opportunities for students to collaborate with open source communities through out their degree. | |
| We are aware of Computer Science modules and master programmes[^csprogs]. | |
| Through those opportunities, students will be also interacting with various industries that are also open source users and contributors. | |
| Though this may start with Computer Science students, it won't only be focused on STEM disciplines, but aimed to all programs. | |
| The OPSO will promote existing and develop new opportunities for students to collaborate with open source communities throughout their degree. | |
| Through those opportunities, students will be interacting with various industries that are open source users and contributors. | |
| We are already aware of relevant Computer Science modules and master programmes[^csprogs], | |
| and will build from this to cover all programmes where students develop software, not just STEM disciplines. |
| Through those opportunities, students will be also interacting with various industries that are also open source users and contributors. | ||
| Though this may start with Computer Science students, it won't only be focused on STEM disciplines, but aimed to all programs. | ||
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| Collaborate with already established international open source hackathons such asUN Hackathon and/or NASA Open Science. |
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| Collaborate with already established international open source hackathons such asUN Hackathon and/or NASA Open Science. | |
| Collaborations will be formed with established international open source hackathons such as UN Hackathon or NASA Open Science. |
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I've run out of time to continue today, but have tried to give a thorough proof-read to make this look professional for the committee.
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Looks good. Some comments.
| UCL has a long history of open-source software development for research and open-source educational resources. | ||
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| In a recent study, we identified more than a thousand open-source software projects owned[^owned] by the UCL community that are directly related to UCL research, publications, or teaching on the GitHub platform. | ||
| The oldest[^oldest] of these projects dates back to 1997, notably before the invention of git itself[^?Do people know what's git], and is still one of our most active projects today. |
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I don't think the invention of git is particularly relevant here. According to wikipedia opensource has been around at least since the 1950s, well before git appeared.
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| The oldest[^oldest] of these projects dates back to 1997, notably before the invention of git itself[^?Do people know what's git], and is still one of our most active projects today. | |
| The oldest[^oldest] of these projects dates back to 1997 and is still one of our most active projects today. |
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| Finally, there are also some financial risks, | ||
| without an OSPO, the university | ||
| may spend on closed source products when there are good and cheaper open source alternatives; |
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Because opensource is by definition free, it's difficult to do a like for like cost comparison with closed source. Maybe it's just better?
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| may spend on closed source products when there are good and cheaper open source alternatives; | |
| may spend on closed source products when there are better open source alternatives; |
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| #### Year 2-3 | ||
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| Data scrapping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations on publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. |
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| Data scrapping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations on publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. | |
| Data scraping and metrics analysis will be improved to measure citations on publications, risk of software dependencies and licensing. |
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| ### Plan | ||
| An OSPO in UCL will become a team providing a central hub of communication, research, training and support, with different scopes. | ||
| The team will be composed by a pool of staff and students from across the university and managed by a committee formed by delegates representing different aspect of the university (namely research, education, infrastructure, community, policy,services). |
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It would be good to get explicit involvement of UCL Business. Whenever they used to do a department talk about commercialisation a researcher would always ask about open science/open source and possible impacts on commercialisation. The answers are generally a bit vague. It would be good if UCLB has access to some strong examples of UCL opensource projects and commercialisation.
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| The team will be composed by a pool of staff and students from across the university and managed by a committee formed by delegates representing different aspect of the university (namely research, education, infrastructure, community, policy,services). | |
| The team will be composed by a pool of staff and students from across the university and managed by a committee formed by delegates representing different aspect of the university (namely research, education, infrastructure, community, policy, services, UCLB). |
| - Digital education; | ||
| - The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis; | ||
| - and Mechanical Engineering. | ||
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UCLB? See my earlier comment.
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| Our university as many institutions and organisations around the globe depends on Open Source, | ||
| whether it's software, hardware, data or other resources as research and educational outputs. | ||
| Open source software is everywhere and it has a huge economic impact. | ||
| The [State of Open Source paper][sospaper], shows that 96% of all software included open source software. | ||
| Moreover, a [study from the Harvard Business School][harvard-oss] has shown recently that open source software generated $8.8 trillion of value and production costs are reduced a factor of 3.5. | ||
| Other open source "products" haven't been under such a detailed analysis yet, however, from the point of view of an university, | ||
| they are still very important, for example for the Open Science reproducibility mission as well as for the creation of Open Educational resources. |
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This bit talks about different types of open source (open data, open science) etc. Some of which is already covered by UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship. But the rest of the document seems to be explicitly about open source software. Should we make it clearer here that the OPSO is all about open source software?
| Other open source "products" haven't been under such a detailed analysis yet, however, from the point of view of an university, | ||
| they are still very important, for example for the Open Science reproducibility mission as well as for the creation of Open Educational resources. | ||
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| The creation of an Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) helps to coordinate its usage and development as well as to nurture its adoption across the university. |
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Could be more precise here.
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| The creation of an Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) helps to coordinate its usage and development as well as to nurture its adoption across the university. | |
| The creation of an Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) helps to coordinate the use and development of open source software and to nurture the adoption of open source software across the university. |
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Some more suggestions for the parts I didn't get to earlier!
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| At the moment we have been developing the office with a 0.3 FTE provided by ARC. | ||
| We estimate that for year 1 we will required a combined effort of 1 FTE, | ||
| and increase that through out the years to reach 3 FTE. |
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| At the moment we have been developing the office with a 0.3 FTE provided by ARC. | |
| We estimate that for year 1 we will required a combined effort of 1 FTE, | |
| and increase that through out the years to reach 3 FTE. | |
| At the moment we have been developing the office with 0.3 FTE provided by ARC. | |
| We estimate that for year 1 we will required a combined effort of 1 FTE, | |
| and aim to increase that to reach 3 FTE by year 5. |
| We estimate that for year 1 we will required a combined effort of 1 FTE, | ||
| and increase that through out the years to reach 3 FTE. | ||
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| We believe this could be done by contributions from other departments with a maximum of 1 FTE from ARC. |
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This would need to be subject to ARC SLT approval.
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| We believe this could be done by contributions from other departments with a maximum of 1 FTE from ARC. | ||
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| Additionally, there will be costs required to participation on conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. |
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| Additionally, there will be costs required to participation on conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. | |
| Additionally, there will be costs required for participation in conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. |
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| Additionally, there will be costs required to participation on conferences. Those costs could be covered by the department of the delegate. | ||
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| The OSPO members will look out for funding opportunities that could help to buy out time from UCL members or pay for students to carry out some of the propose tasks. |
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| The OSPO members will look out for funding opportunities that could help to buy out time from UCL members or pay for students to carry out some of the propose tasks. | |
| The OSPO members will look out for funding opportunities that could buy out time from UCL staff or pay for students to carry out some of the proposed tasks. |
| - to avoid time spent reinventing software or falling into licensing incompatibilities, | ||
| - to recommend where the university should invest efforts to support sustainability of projects, | ||
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| <!-- NOTE: Is this sufficient to make it financially sustainable for UCL? --> |
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This section is not currently a cost/benefit analysis, and largely repeats points made already.
I think we need to address:
- whether the requested effort is simply a refocusing of existing core-funded staff to work together via a single team
- new FTE that will need to be paid for
And then think about how we quantify what the cost savings to UCL might be from the OSPO activities. It might be that one Year 1 activity is to investigate this further as a prelude to expansion!
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| The UCL OSPO will comprise a core team from ARC and _at least one_ delegated representative from each team or department in the university that has a stake in open source. | ||
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| These teams are: |
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| These teams are: | |
| These teams include: |
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| The emphasis is on _at least_, because we aim to encourage members from these and other teams to join voluntarily. | ||
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| This committee will report to UCL's digital research board (ARC) and the Open Science & Scholarship Committee. |
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Suggested change
| This committee will report to UCL's digital research board (ARC) and the Open Science & Scholarship Committee. | |
| This committee will report to UCL's [Digital Research Board](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/advanced-research-computing/digital-research-and-innovation-board-terms-reference) and the Open Science & Scholarship Committee. |
Not sure if the other committee has a web page?
| > The communication plan can help foster an atmosphere of transparency and engagement among stakeholders. The plan outlines how, when and what will be communicated so that everyone is informed and has a shared understanding. | ||
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| The OSPO will follow what's known as Open Development practices, publishing everything in the website with all the decisions and minutes publicly available. |
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| The OSPO will follow what's known as Open Development practices, publishing everything in the website with all the decisions and minutes publicly available. | |
| The OSPO will follow "Open Development" practices, publishing everything on its website with all the decisions and minutes publicly available. |
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| ### Supporters | ||
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| ARC supports this initiative, providing at the moment 0.2 FTE and funding the 4-week deployment of the open source metrics tool last year. |
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| If the community feels that the OSPO has supported them. For this we will keep some metrics on our efforts, like people helped and projects supported. | ||
| Community activities and participation will provide insights of whether we are doing a good work reaching all the departments and their interests. |
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This will need improving, similarly to the financial analysis above.
Suggested change
| If the community feels that the OSPO has supported them. For this we will keep some metrics on our efforts, like people helped and projects supported. | |
| Community activities and participation will provide insights of whether we are doing a good work reaching all the departments and their interests. | |
| - Whether the UCL community feels that the OSPO has supported them. | |
| We will record engagement with and feedback on our efforts, such as people trained, advice given and projects supported. | |
| - Whether the OSPO's activities have engaged every part of UCL, supporting all faculties, departments and centres. | |
| - Longer term, quantifiable financial impacts will be tracked, such as the replacement of closed-source products with open alternatives leading to lower procurement and licensing costs. | |
| - Better tracking of UCL-produced open source software will allow us to assess whether its use externally and impact have increased. |
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