Skilled, effective mentorship on open source research projects can provide an opportunity for faculty and researchers to identify and bolster the work of hidden gems – including talented and driven students who never considered graduate school as part of their career trajectory. Since 2018, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS), and more recently the UCSC OSPO, has been matching talented student contributors with mentors and their open source research projects. Starting as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and then expanding mentoring efforts to include additional sponsors within the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE), the team at UCSC has worked to seed open source communities across multiple University of California (UC) campuses by bringing in new contributors to UC research projects. This presentation will look at what the OSRE team has learned from these hands-on mentoring efforts, and propose practical ways these types of programs can be replicated elsewhere to support the work of more academic open source ecosystems. To further highlight how programs like these can have real-world impact on students and open source communities, the discussion will feature the story of UCSC PhD student Jayjeet Chakraborty, who first came to the attention of the UCSC mentors through the GSoC program then developed into a key contributor to a CROSS incubator project, and was ultimately recruited into the computer science PhD program at UCSC. The presentation will explore Jayjeet's evolution through these roles, and how his experience can provide inspiration for engaging and empowering contributors, and assist with improving a project’s long-term impact and sustainability. The session will also focus on how this approach could be used to strengthen the pool of contributors supported by the OSRE and similar programs, including innovative ways of bringing open source education and relevant training to a broader cross-section of students.
Speakers: Stephanie Lieggi Carlos Maltzahn Jayjeet Chakraborty