photo of an open sign

The Johns Hopkins University Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) is the central hub for open source at JHU. We are committed to helping faculty, staff, and students create, contribute to, and benefit from open source software by:

  • Fostering an engaged campus community, promoting the value and measuring the impact of open source, and connecting Hopkins with the wider open source ecosystem.
  • Offering educational programs, information, and best practices to enable faculty, staff, and students to effectively use, contribute to, and benefit from open source software.
  • Providing resources and expertise to help advance and sustain open source initiatives within the Hopkins community.

The Open Source Programs Office is part of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries, which supports open scholarship through the development of digital infrastructure and applications.   

Key Initiatives for 2025

  • Continue to build awareness of the OSPO and its services, promote collaboration among OSS programs, encourage participation in open source software development, and highlight the successes of OSS programs on campus.
  • Identify relevant metrics about open source value and impact and work to collect, analyze, and interpret them. 
  • Provide consulting services to open source projects on campus to improve long-term growth and sustainability. 
  • Work with professional organizations, working groups, other academic OSPOs, foundations, and others to support and advance the OSPO community of practice.
  • Collaborate with campus leadership to expand support for OS wishing to commercialize or needing an org home / fiscal sponsor.
  • Provide training opportunities focused on essential resources and best practices for faculty, students, and staff to improve their open source and open science capabilities.

History and Past Projects

The DRCC launched the first US university-based OSPO by working with open-source companies and foundations with the goal of establishing a model for other universities. Through the OSPO, Johns Hopkins University has become a member of the Eclipse Foundation including access to their working groups. The JHU OSPO is also part of the CURIOSS, OSPO++, and SustainOSS networks, which work to support and promote the work of OSPOs and open-source programs within academic and civic organizations. The Open Source Programs Office is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

Semesters of Code: Through a partnership with JHU’s Department of Computer Science and Microsoft, the OSPO supported JHU students’ participation in Semesters of Code, a course offering a mentored experience with open-source software from both within and beyond Johns Hopkins University. 

Good Practices Primer – Code and Software: Working with OSPO++, published an updated open-source primer as part of the National Academies Roundtable for Aligning Incentives on Open Science toolkit, which has already been cited as an exemplar for how other communities can advance the work of the toolkit. 

Lutece: Demonstrated the use of Lutece, an open source municipal services platform developed and used by the City of Paris, at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center in west Baltimore.  

OSPO Annual Reports