This month Virginia Scarlett will be joining from UC Santa Barbara to discuss the 2025 UC OSPO Survey. Once considered a radical experiment, open source software is now ubiquitous in the modern technology landscape. In the technology industry, the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is a common way to centralize a company’s open source strategy, knowledge, and diligence. Meanwhile, OSPOs are just beginning to take root in academia. While guidance for university OSPOs is emerging, many questions remain about how OSPOs best support their university’s strategic priorities and their community’s needs.

The University of California (UC) OSPO Network is working to develop infrastructure for open source education, discovery, and sustainability at UC by pooling our resources and knowledge. To develop our strategic priorities and to assess the state of UC open source, we conducted a survey in April 2025 of more than 230 UC-affiliated open source contributors. This survey sheds light on how and why academics contribute to open source projects, as well as some of the barriers holding them back.

The Bay Area Open Science Group is a growing community for Bay Area academics and researchers interested in incorporating open science into their research, teaching, and learning. Targeting students, faculty, and staff at UCSF, Berkeley, and Stanford, the goal of the community is to increase awareness of and engagement with all things open science, including open access articles, open research data, open source software, and open educational resources. Through this work the group hopes to connect researchers with tools they can use to make the products and process of science more equitable and reproducible.