by Sarah Bender, Communications Coordinator
July 2024 marks two years since Helen and Henry Posner, Jr. Dean of the University Libraries Keith Webster established the Carnegie Mellon University Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) with funds from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Led by Associate Dean for Digital Infrastructure Sayeed Choudhury, the OSPO has grown as a community resource for open source activity across campus, while continuing to provide strategic guidance and thought leadership in key areas.
Choudhury, who serves as director of the OSPO, brings extensive expertise in open-source technologies and advocacy to the role. Last year, he received a grant of $249,896 from the Sloan Foundation to launch community building efforts to support those enabling open source in academia and research institutions. Beyond CMU, he was appointed senior advisor on open source for the social change venture the Omidyar Network, and appointed to the board of the Open Source Initiative.
Under his leadership, the OSPO played host to the inaugural convening of the Community for University & Research Institute OSPOs (CURIOSS) on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in December 2023. This event marked the first in-person meeting of this multi-institutional initiative focused on building a network of open source program offices in university and research institute contexts. The comprehensive day-long meeting brought together representatives from fourteen universities across the US and Ireland as well as representatives from the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
The OSPO even participated in the production of a short documentary film that aired on the COP28 climate summit live stream during conference proceedings. The film, titled “Open Source: Building Community to Address Sustainability and Climate Change” featured interviews with CMU leaders and researchers, including Webster and Choudhury. It showcased CMU’s work in the field for a broad international audience, and demonstrated how open source software provides a framework through which this research can be translated for direct impact on a local and global scale.
At the start of 2024, the OSPO launched a new initiative focused on infrastructure: Ecosystem for Next Generation Infrastructure (ENGIN), an umbrella organization focusing on human-centered development of next generation infrastructure. Examples of ENGIN’s early programs include addressing climate change and decarbonization by working with the Open Energy Outlook, enhancing cybersecurity by working with the Software Engineering Institute at CMU, incorporating open source and open science practices into the ongoing design and development of Carnegie Mellon University’s remote-access autonomous lab facility.
Recognizing the importance of the human dimension of infrastructure, ENGIN will also support educational experiences with open source software at all three of Carnegie Mellon’s campuses in Pittsburgh, Doha, and Kigali, Rwanda. The initiative is focused on building mentorship capacity on a global scale.
ENGIN’s newest program is the Open Forum for AI (OFAI), an initiative led by CMU that will build capacity for a human-centered AI that moves us toward augmented intelligence. Leveraging CMU’s AI expertise, OFAI will include partners from CMU, other university OSPOs, and open source groups, who offer a range of complementary skills necessary for collective action for AI strategy and associated policy development. OFAI will include five thematic areas: research, technical prototypes, policy recommendations, community engagement, and talent for service.
Central to OFAI’s charge is the idea that AI development should be focused on serving humanity, with a diverse range of stakeholders to ensure that it advances public interest. OFAI will advocate for wider involvement in the AI ecosystem to shape policy-making and address issues such as AI safety, privacy, and equity. To do this, the program will coordinate research and policy objectives and act as a clearinghouse for policy research. In addition, OFAI will also work to create and manage a community and build relationships, convening diverse groups, organizing events and roundtables, and implementing an educational program to identify talent for AI public sector roles.
Omidyar Network and NobleReach Foundation provided funding for OFAI, and initial partners include the Open Source Initiative and the Atlantic Council. Together, ENGIN and OFAI will reflect the recognition that open source software and open science are key drivers of next-generation and digital infrastructures.
“Even at this early stage, the CMU OSPO has developed services, capacity and community to advance open source within the university,” Choudhury said. “As our capacity grows, we embrace that CMU can play an important role in national or even global programs or policy development through ENGIN and the Open Forum for AI.”
Locally, the OSPO has used its funding to support other initiatives across campus. Since the summer of 2023, it has supported Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research Joshua Sunshine, Ph.D. student Wode Ni, and their work on their project Penrose — a platform that enables people to create diagrams just by typing notation in plain text.
“It's been really great to be able to talk to the on-campus open-source experts at the OSPO. When we have a question about how to onboard contributors, organize our community, or measure our growth, we ask Tom and Sayeed,” Sunshine said. “We're computer scientists, so we're experts in the technical aspects of open source — putting our code on GitHub, running continuous integration, etc. The OSPO has helped us develop expertise in onboarding, governance, and other crucial community aspects of open source.”
With the start of the fall semester, the OSPO has expanded their offerings to support open source projects and ecosystems across campus with new tools, expanded services, and community partnerships. With newly available analytics tools Bitergia and Scarf, CMU teams can measure the health, activity, and usage of their software in ways previously unavailable on campus. In addition to new tools, the OSPO is offering one-on-one project advising sessions, helping community members develop goals and strategies for healthy and sustainable projects. Beyond their own offerings, the OSPO continues to support community programs across campus through partnerships on public events and workshops. Start a conversation with the OSPO at ospo@andrew.cmu.edu.
As a community convener and center of competency, the OSPO will continue to build open source capacity within CMU and beyond, leveraging the institution's research, teaching, and policy expertise to maximize its social impact on a global scale. Through ENGIN, OFAI, and other programs, its capacity to provide strategic guidance and thought leadership in these important areas will drive further innovation and collaboration in the coming year.