- Title: Creating a community of contributors for scientific open-source projects: The preCICE case
- Speaker: Gerasimos Chourdakis, Technical University of Munich
- Authors: Gerasimos Chourdakis, Benjamin Uekermann, + more
- Event: NL-RSE19, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Date: November 20, 2019
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Contributors are vital for open-source projects and users are essential for a scientific project to have impact in society. Still, scientific projects often suffer from low visibility and trust, while only the core developers contribute.
Getting (the right) users is a very fulfilling, yet long trip. Turning them further into motivated contributors is even harder, but can be invaluable for the project's sustainability. From getting the first user to establishing a self-sustained community, it is essential for a project to provide continuous user support, low communication barrier, and active development. However, as the community grows, it also needs to function in a scalable, distributed way.
On the technical side, splitting a project into components that can isolate any "damage" and establishing a reliable testing infrastructure can increase the confidence of new contributors. With a detailed code reviewing culture and brave integration into the project, these contributors can further turn to senior maintainers.
Having a strong backbone in high-performance computing and multi-physics simulations, preCICE now needs additional expertise to adapt to a growing number of users. This talk will present our findings on developing a project with isolated components, our exploration of different communication channels, and the many benefits and challenges that a diverse community can bring to scientific projects.
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