Should Harvard have an Open Source Program Office (OSPO)?

[Philip Durbin]

I just listened to https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/733 and @planspark mentioned that Sloan has funded the creation of an Open Source Program Office (OPSO) at several universities. Should Harvard have one?

The transcript from https://youtu.be/1NHDcZrciJ4?t=2457 is a little rough but here it is, for now:

I just want to mention there is a foundation out there um the Sloan
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Foundation um and one of their programs is about creating open source program offices or
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hospitals at universities right so they I think they had a an initial pilot with
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six universities including UC Santa Cruz um and I think they're about to launch
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another six I think and so this is the idea of giving open source a more
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strategic home at a university right so have a central you're familiar with the
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open source program office I'm assuming so it's basically a central Hub that can
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you know coordinate and and drive and measure and Advance open source across
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the entire organization versus each department doing their own thing right so we've been working very closely with
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the uh Oslo at us UC Santa Cruz and uh uh we're very interested in I
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guess kind of piggybacking on these efforts as we can you know within hospital it's much easier for us to get a view of the you know open source
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science that's happening at a university

Here are the grants I've found so far:

• To pilot a postdoctoral fellowship on open source software development and support other activities at the University of California Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office: https://sloan.org/grant-detail/9723
• To help establish the Carnegie Mellon University Open Source Program Office, including activities focused on software around core facilities and government software R&D: https://sloan.org/grant-detail/10077
• To provide continued support for faculty open source software needs and build capacity for external partnerships at the Rochester Institute of Technology Open Source Projects Office: https://sloan.org/grant-detail/10076