Speaker
Description
High Energy (Nuclear) Physics and Open Source are a perfect match with a long history. CERN has created an Open Source Program Office (CERN OSPO [1]) to help open-source hardware and software in the CERN community - for CERN staff and the experiments’ users. In the wider context, open source and CERN’s OSPO have key roles in CERN’s Open Science Policy [2]. With the OSPO, open-source projects should have more visibility inside and outside the organization, as contributions to society; the OSPO’s team of practitioners want to make open source at CERN an easier, obvious task.
This presentation will provide you with an overview of the mission and objectives of the CERN Open Source Program Office (OSPO). This contribution exposes how the OSPO can and needs to help, what the OSPO wants to achieve, and what an OSPO’s role might be in the HE(N)P software ecosystem. After more than a year in active engagement, we will share insights encountered so far, including the different challenges of open source in different parts of CERN. The presentation will share some behind-the-scenes stories: what the challenges were in creating it, what makes it special compared to other OSPOs, and why the OSPO won’t do some things you might expect it to do. We will present the initial set of technical recommendations (“best practices”) as proposed by the CERN OSPO; some alignment across institutions might be beneficial for the global HE(N)P community.
By sharing the CERN OSPO’s journey, challenges, and lessons learned, we hope to provide valuable insights relevant to other HE(N)P centers, open-source projects, and the wider open source community.
[1] https://opensource.cern/mandate
[2] https://openscience.cern/policies
