Conference information/Schedule

Introductions

2025 UC OSPO Survey

Virginia Scarlett, UCSB Library

  • OSS important for learning and research
  • Large body of research invisible to the university
  • Challenges
    • Time: writing documentation
  • Solutions
    • Funding: provide grants for sustainability
  • OSS contributors feel work is invisible
  • People are motivated beyond just their resources
  • Dataset recently published

Community information

Laura Langdon, UC OSPO Network

  • Resources from here
    • Finding collaborators or projects at other campuses
    • Documentation, repo scaffolding, community best practices
    • more
  • UC OSPO connects people across department lines
  • Tools from ucospo.net
    • ORB (repo browser)
    • OSSPREY (sustainability forcasting)
    • Repo templates
    • Services

Takeaways:

  • Time/documentation writing is a shared challenge
  • The UC OSPO network is a useful resource (licenses, citations, community)
  • Additional software tools for projects

Influence of AI on Open Source and Open Scholarships

Fernando Perez (Berkeley)

  • Doctors investigating cancer had demonstrated loss in skill after 3 months of using AI tool
  • Companies are interested in foundations as neutral spaces for advancing shared tools

Sahiba (Berkeley)

  • Business school
  • Use AI as a tool to achieve research goals
  • Seeing contributors getting banned for not disclosing AI

Marit (Davis)

  • Language instructor
  • Interested in using AI for research
  • IT challenges for infrastructure

Tara (UCSC, MongoDB)

  • Actively hostile against AI
  • By locking down AI contributions, lead to forks
    • People will take the easiest path
  • Worked on the movie WALLE

Takeaways:

  • Every field is computer science/data science
  • AI is a “quick” coding tool to achieve high level goals
  • AI is a tool that requires technical skills to understand the low level
    • (Example) writing, no benefit from AI writing as they have the skills
  • National Research platform (NRP) is a federal resource that hosts AI models
    • Have other resources beyond models, looks like generic k8s infrastructure
    • link

Breakout: Building Open Source and Open Science Ecosystems

The OCUDU Blueprint

Ranny Haiby, Linux Foundation

  • Four core factors
    • Neutrality
    • IP Clarify
    • Open Governance Do-ocracy
    • Financial support ecosystem
  • Open source definitions of cellular infrastructure
  • Came from DOD to make resilient infrastructure
  • Created foundation to handle specification
  • Future DOD bids will require use of OCUDU
  • Created platform to match academics with industry

Open Science Assistant (OSA): An Easy-to-Onboard AI Chatbot for Open Source Research Projects

Seyed Yahya Shirazi, UCSD

  • Structures for data sharing with AI
  • Open source research is underfunded
  • Shared tools for open source collectives
  • Goal: precise, citation-backed answer from AI assistants
  • *Can build a live FAQ from historical discussions
  • link

Using Continuous Integration to Ensure Accessible Experiences

Rebecca and Silas Santini, UCSB

  • Building a github action system for ensure accessibility of course website
  • Leveraging open source principles in managing course websites
  • tool for accessibility
  • Essentially a linter for accessibility
  • Has a github action that can be used on any website
  • github/berkeley-cdss/berkeley-class-site/

Takeaways

  • There is an open source ecosystem with many tools used to maintain projects

Breakout: Open Source Tools for Public Benefit

Missed first two talks since I was presenting.

Building Tools for Police Accountability

Tarak Shah, Berkeley, BIDS

  • Data on police misconduct
  • State law for transparency and accountability in police
  • Fight back from police unions
    • Documents being destroyed after record keeping is up
  • Biggest group of users is lawyers
  • 20 TB of unstructured data
  • Good reference for a lot of data science problems
    • Segmentation
    • Linking files

Communication Tools for Breaking Up with the Surveillance State

Robin Riley, Open Chapters

website

  • Matrix
    • Seen adoption more in Euro
    • Linux foundation
    • Mostly organizations
  • Signal
    • Similar to texting
    • More individual
  • Weakpoints
    • Software keyboards/notifications are weakpoints
    • Multi-client setups
  • Can’t beat surveillance without going mainstream
  • As adoption goes up, risk goes down
  • Improvements needed for security
    • Governance
    • Funding
    • Peer-to-peer
    • Mesh networking

Keynote: Open Source AI and Public Sphere: Two Paradoxes

Kevin Esterling, UCR

  • Poli sci major
  • Majority of people make use of closed source models
  • Two paradoxes
    • AI enhances deliberation to induct reasoning even if the model is closed source
    • AI undermines deliberation to replace reasoning even if the model is open source
  • Open/close source models does not matter
  • Polis: Open source platform to find common ground on complex issues
    • Uses claude under the hood
    • Foster community discussion
  • Habermas Machine (Michael Tesler)
    • Academic publication
    • Uses Chinchilla LLM
    • Fosters community discussion
  • Prytaneum
    • Uses Gemini
    • Developed by the speaker
    • Webinar platform to extract engagement
    • Audit LLMs to meet normative standards