Open-Source Ecosystems and Networks Research Awards from UVM

đź“Ł Sustainer Talk
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https://vermontcomplexsystems.org/partner/OCEAN/awards/

The University of Vermont Open-Source Ecosystems and Networks (OCEAN) research team is excited to announce the launch of the Open-Source Ecosystems and Networks Research Awards program, The OCEAN awards program will provide financial support to a global network of researchers, students, and open source experts who are working to deepen understanding of how people, teams, and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings, especially in open-source projects and communities. Funding will be given for four types of proposals types: collaboration awards, pilot research project awards, computing resources awards, and micro-awards.

“The mission of OCEAN is to study how open-source communities come together to solve complex problems,” says UVM Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne. “To do so, the OCEAN project itself must be open and supportive of outside ideas and solutions. These awards will therefore contribute to our research mission and also help us build new bridges between UVM and research groups and open-source communities around the globe." says UVM professor and OCEAN co-leader Laurent Hébert-Dufresne.

Interested groups and individuals from all fields and professional stages are encouraged to apply Awardees will be welcomed into the OCEAN research community to collaborate with one another via a shared Slack workspace, quarterly virtual brainstorming meetings, and a shared Github repository.

Important dates Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis until November 1, 2021.

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Great to hear about it, Richard. Sounds like an interesting programme - I’ll have to investigate it (and the awards) further.

What’d be even cooler, though, would be if you were directing folks to collaborate on an open source collaboration platform rather than Slack (e.g. Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost/etc.), and putting code into an open source repository rather than GitHub (e.g. Gitlab Community Edition, Savannah, Gitea, etc.). I’ve written this about why open source communities should work to be “prefigurative” in all their technology choices: https://davelane.nz/notslack

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Good feedback, Dave.

For reference: this isn’t my programme, I just heard about it from people at OCEAN who I am in touch with. I figured it would be good to share with this group! I know some people here who have projects which would be excellent candidates for this fund.

Thanks for pointing out open source communities would benefit from dogfooding where they assemble. I appreciate it. Do you have other feedback on the award, itself?

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Thanks Richard, and thanks for clarifying that this isn’t something you’re running, Richard, (I didn’t realise that initially) and are just passing on the notification. I’ll provide feedback directly to those running the OCEAN project.

I find it hard to withstand the irony (and the rather bum note it strikes) that they’re using exclusively proprietary technologies to determine how open source communities collaborate to solve complex problems - I need to commenting on it :slightly_smiling_face:. That approach will ensure they’re systemically filtering out probably their most informed prospective respondents who, as a matter of principle, won’t use their collaboration tools.