Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Dean for Digital Infrastructure, Applications and Services; Head of Open Source Programs Office
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins has launched the first US university-based open source programs office or OSPO. Several companies have Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) to manage their internal engineering practices, license choices, risk mitigation, etc. Hopkins OSPO has expanded upon this corporate OSPO model to treat open source software as a primary research object. By doing so, the OSPO has created new relationships for the library with research administration, technology transfer, and the University community of open source developers and users. Perhaps most importantly, the Hopkins OSPO has created new forms of education, partnerships and impact. Examples include semesters of code, a Black Digital Humanities Project, support for a health informatics community, a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Contributor Fund, and a partnership with the City of Paris to expand upon an open source municipal services platform for a local community center in West Baltimore. Through the OSPO++ community, Hopkins led the effort to augment the draft National Academies toolkit on open code and software, which now includes a recommendation to create 20 OSPOs throughout the US (matching a recent recommendation by the European Commission).