What academia can learn from open source

Practices vary between scientific domains but all too often the sharing of research software is done on an ad hoc basis between individuals and with little thought about the wider community. With code and computation encapsulating an ever-increasing fraction of research activity, now more than ever there is a need to develop a culture of sharing and reuse similar to that found in open source communities.

Transcript

1. What Academia Can Learn from Open Source Arfon Smith @arfon Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
2. !
3. What is a GitHub?
12. Astrophysics for non- astronomers
13. tl;dr - technical, but brimming with inefficiencies
14. http://www.flickr.com/photos/blachswan
15. http://www.flickr.com/photos/esoastronomy/
16. http://www.flickr.com/photos/esoastronomy/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamiegilbert
17. http://amandabauer.blogspot.com/
20. Diffraction grating Telescope Detector
26. 130 130 1 2048 189 189 258 258 480 562 378 378 493 521 390 397 851 851 247 274 319 319 304 580 493 511 610 636 188 188 228 228 > cat bad_pix_mask.txt
27. Wasteful 2 days work 3 observing runs/week 52 weeks in year 15 year detector lifetime ! 2*3*52*15 = 4680 days (13 years)
28. Wasteful… but the norm 2 days work 3 observing runs/week 52 weeks in year 15 year detector lifetime ! 2*3*52*15 = 4680 days (13 years)
29. How is the Open Source community doing it?
30. Open Source: Ubiquitous culture of reuse
37. Software composed of many components
38. Your software is the thing that is different
39. Low friction collaborations
40. Open source collaborations Open Source vs Open Collaborations
41. Open source collaborations Open Source: the right to modify, not the right to contribute.
42. Open source collaborations Open Collaborations: a highly collaborative development process and are receptive to contributions of code, documentation, discussion, etc from anyone who shows competent interest.
43. Open source collaborations Open Collaborations: a highly collaborative development process and are receptive to contributions of code, documentation, discussion, etc from anyone who shows competent interest. THIS
44. How do 4000 people work together?
45. The pull request
53. Code first, permission later
57. Merged pull requests
62. “open source is… reproducible by necessity” Fernando Perez http://blog.fperez.org/2013/11/an-ambitious-experiment-in-data-science.html
63. Better at collaborating because they have to be
64. (doesn’t have to mean this) Open Public? =
65. Open (within your team, department or institution)
66. Electronic & Available
67. Asynchronous, exposed process
68. Lock-free
69. Low friction collaboration
70. What’s happening in academia today?
71. Collaboration around code
77. Collaborative authoring
80. Collaborative teaching
84. What could be happening in academia?
85. Where do communities form?
86. Around a shared challenge?
87. Around shared data?
89. 10 ? n Level 1 (continual) Level 2 (periodic)
90. LSST is a project that is inherently open
91. Supernovae Weak lensing Active Galactic Nuclei Solar System Galaxies Transients/variable stars Large-scale structure Stars, Milky Way Strong lensing Informatics and Statistics Dark Energy (DESC)
92. LSST has the opportunity to do something differently
93. Copy Open Source
95. Software composed of many components
96. Your software should be the thing that is different
97. science too! Your software should be the thing that is different
98. How do we make this behaviour the norm?
99. Credit
100. “Academic environments of today do not reward tool builders” Ed Lazowska, OSTP event http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/MS/MS.OSTP.pdf
109. “publishing a paper about code is basically just advertising” David Donoho http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/Video.html
111. How to derive meaningful metrics from open contributions?
114. Reproducibility Data intensive
115. Trust
121. Discoverability
123. Barriers are cultural, not technical
124. What can you do today?
125. Establish a virtuous cycle# •  6%working%groups,%each%with%# •  3:6%faculty%from%each%ins;tu;on# 14# http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/MS/MS.OSTP.pdf
126. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tamaleaver/
127. Why are you sharing?
128. Share more often
129. If you’re going to share it then you better put a licence on it
131. Treat documentation as a first class entity
132. Share more often (no matter how small)
133. 130 130 1 2048 189 189 258 258 480 562 378 378 493 521 390 397 851 851 247 274 319 319 304 580 493 511 610 636 188 188 228 228 > cat bad_pix_mask.txt > git clone git@github.com:arfon/aat/pixel_masks
135. Open Data is the least we can do
136. This is not a talk about Open Science
137. This is a talk about Accelerating Science
138. Thanks. arfon@github.com @arfon "