University of Texas Austin

University of Texas Austin#

  • OSPO: Yes, situated across the university in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the central IT office, (CIO), the School of Information (iSchool), and the University Libraries.

  • Personnel: PI - Dr. Jennifer Schopf (TACC), co-PI and Director - Dr. Angela Newell (CIO), co-PI - Dr. James Howison (iSchool), co-PI - Michael Shensky (Libraries).

  • Link: opensource.utexas.edu

  • Member of: Center for Networked Information, CURIOSS, HELIOS

General Description#

UT Austin’s OSPO is one of the few OSPOs that works with a super computing center. It is also at one of the top-funded academic institutions in the US, with between 2-4 billion in research and grant funding every year. Currently, they are trying to hard-wire the OSPO into the university, which includes training staff and hiring staff-training resources.

Core Objectives#

  • Be better at wrangling code for reproducibility purposes.

  • Building out containers, code-wrangling resources, and so on.

  • Develop an ecosystem so people know where to go for help, so that we can advance science and scholarship.

Primary Contacts#

  • Angela Newell, Director and co-PI

  • Jennifer Schopf, PI

Other Context#

The University of Texas Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO) is the center for open source activity, connection, training, and support to enable open source practices as a key part of the university mission. With financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this project is led by personnel from UT Austin’s central IT services, Libraries, iSchool, and TACC in order to form an umbrella organization that is more than the sum of its pieces.

The UT-OSPO coordinates a shared open infrastructure for software development, establishing a central hub for open source support that enables the university to leverage and formalize the pre-existing infrastructure on campus, unify and expand the work already being done in this space, create additional opportunities for engagement among faculty and students, and foster interdisciplinary connections across departments and units.

This infrastructure promotes more reproducible and open research through the development of an ecosystem of researchers engaging and growing open source skills and practice through a pathway of participation. We provide support through:

  • joint training

  • personalized consultations

  • lecture series

  • a help desk network

  • publishing of best practices, and

  • events that help students, faculty, and staff engage with open source software.

The UT-OSPO is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, grant G-2023-20944.

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