University of California Santa Cruz#
OSPO: Yes, in the Center.
Personnel: James David (Director), Stephanie Lieggi (Executive Director)
Member of: CURIOSS, HELIOS (University of California Office of the President (UCOP), and UCSC will become one)
General Description#
CROSS is the research center that the OSPO is based in. The OSPO at UC Santa Cruz is being established to provide a center of gravity that brings together everything needed to unlock that potential. The UCSC OSPO’s mission is to create partnerships with stakeholders within and outside the UC system to promote open source literacy and best practices, helping students learn from open source communities, letting scientists use open source to accelerate research efforts, and connecting students and scientists with sponsors from industry, government, and foundations.
CROSS, meanwhile, creates open source leaders by blending open source software strategies with graduate-level research in a concentrated environment of mentorship and interaction with world class industry, academia, and open source experts. CROSS transfers cutting-edge technology resulting from student research to industry via successful open source projects.
Core Objectives#
The CROSS stakeholders and their benefits are:
Industry gets to:
Leverage open source software to create and shape new markets
Network with talent and potential recruits
Influence education, research, and the next generation OSS systems
Talent (Students, Postdocs) can:
Become an OSS leader and well-known expert
Learn how to get systems built
Know where to find the right tools & technologies
UC Santa Cruz gets to:
Efficiently transfer technology and strengthen its beacon of innovation
Attract and fund talented graduate students
Leveragge the OSS communities and technologies for education and research
Primary Contacts#
Stephanie Lieggi, Executive Director
James Davis, Faculty Director
Emily Lovell, Incubator fellow
Other context#
CROSS is one of the few centres at a university that have figured out how to successfully use open source software to bridge industry and academia, by enabling institutions that want PhDs to work on specific projects to work closely with the students as they work on their project in the open. They are one of the earlier university OSPOs. The OSPO will split out from CROSS, but for now, they are basically similar entities.
Carlos Maltzahn ran the OSPO for years, before he stepped down in early 2024 to retire.
CROSS’s OSPO project was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, along with several other OSPOs in 2022. Building on the success of the OSPO at UC Santa Cruz, funding was awarded in 2024 to develop a multi-campus OSPO network in the University of California system. The UC OSPO network aims to strengthen collaboration and knowledge-sharing among the campuses, demonstrate the value of a networked approach to supporting open source, and identify a resource and governance structure to allow the network to grow and thrive. More information here.