Sustaining Open Source Software and Their Communities in Computational Geodynamics

Lorraine Hwang Associate Director Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics University of California, Davis

Bio

Lorraine J. Hwang is the Associate Director at the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include sustainable software and preservation of historical seismogram data. She received her Ph.D. in Seismology from the California Institute of Technology.

Abstract

Established in 2005 with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG, geodynamics.org) is a partnership between solid-earth geophysics and computational science. CIG advances geophysics and related fields of research by developing and disseminating high quality, open source scientific software. CIG sustains its community by supporting community building and the implementation of best practices in software and training. CIG's Minimum, Standard, and Target Software Best Practices provide guidelines to developers who wish to share their code. However, to succeed and be sustainable, a software development project requires champions willing to invest in building a group of users through workshops, tutorials, and hackathons who can grow into user-developers and eventually, code maintainers. CIG Software Training Best Practices establish guidelines for both instructors and participants to maximize the benefits from CIG's training and events. Multi-day hackathons in the ASPECT software community have proven effective for growing both the code and the developer base, fostering peer mentoring relationships and new collaborations, and preparing the geophysics scientific workforce to be expert users and to contribute to scientific software.
See: https://geodynamics.org/cig/dev/best-practices or https://github.com/geodynamics/best_practices

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