OSPOs for Good – A symposium at the UN.

I, together with Malvika Sharan and Arielle Bennett from the Alan Turing Institute / The Turing Way and Neil Chue Hong from Software Sustainable Institute, attended at the beginning of July OSPOs for Good symposium at the United Nations Headquarters, representing research institutions from the UK.

What’s an OSPO?

An Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) is an entity within an organisation that looks after their Open Source strategy and operation. OSPOs have been set in the industry for many years (and under many different names), but it’s only till recent years when academic and research institutions as well as government and world organisations have also started to create them. Certainly, the goals of all these different OSPOs differ, but by having a common name helps to develop a fabric across them to promote collaboration.

OSPOs for good?

At the symposium, OSPOs from different entities – national and local level government, institutions and private sector – together with open source communities, think tanks, and activists, joined together to discuss how Open Source and through those varied programme offices can be used to help tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ideas ranged from those that can run within specific communities, companies, or institutions to collaborations across all of them. 

For over two years now, the UN has been running an OSPO, and this event is part of their commitment to working with the whole world. The symposium gave details about how OSPOs were formed and their motivations, as well as advertise initiatives from those attending. For example, the OSPO at the UN started by a survey to all its sub-organisations to know their positions on Open Source Software, whether that’s from a user, creator, maintainer, community member or stakeholder point of view. They have grown fast and highlighted that Open Source is more than Open Source Software! Open Source covers open communities, knowledge, data, science, …. On the digital front, these were referred to as Digital Public Goods (DPGs), which I think conveys more weight than open source software or open data. A person may not understand what open source software is, but a public good resonates that it has something good for them!

On open source communities, however, many of us have the tendency to focus on the software and forget to look beyond it. How can we go an extra step and check how what we are creating can be relevant to the SDGs? That may look too hard (and even ambitious?), if that’s the case, we should have a commitment to no harm – I firstly heard it from Malvika’s talk: Applying Do No Harm principle to enhance open source sustainability at SOOCon24. That’s where many of us need to start with, reviewing our practices and applying do-no-harm principles within our communities to work towards Open Source for good.

Though many people see the goods of Open Source for the world, not everyone at is an open source advocate! Even within the UN, they’ve got challenges and myths against Open Source that are common in many other communities. Some of these are based on trusting more big tech companies or using privacy or security concerns as an excuse to prevent opening their source (whether it’s data, code or knowledge). Regarding security, however, a recent event that caused a worldwide mayhem demonstrates that vulnerabilities are not exclusively on open source software.

From understanding how UN’s OSPO works within a multi-organisation level, we moved into a state/local government level. In Germany, they are working to unite much of the different wheel-reinventions at different states into a more collaborative approach where the tools and processes are shared (such as platforms like openCode). This has not only stopped there, but they are collaborating with France too! There, the BlueHats initiative helps to promote and recognise the community behind Open Source development within government. Funding open source is a big problem, and that was discussed too – people from Sovereign TechFund and ZenDiS gave an overview of the current successful model that’s being used in Germany.

Initiatives within foundations and cities were also discussed, as well as the opportunities universities can have collaborating with their local communities on that.

One of the UN’s OSPO star activities mentioned and praised was Reboot the Earth. Five hackathons that happened around the globe to come up with ideas that can advance the SDGs. The winners from each of them presented their ideas to us, and now they are taking part in a coaching programme to scale their solutions. This was very inspiring!

Once the symposium finished, I, together with many of the attendees, participated in a 1-day workshop: What’s next for Open Source? There we had more time to interact and collaborate between us and come up with various lists of actions to keep pushing forward the idea of Open Source for good. At least, one thing was easily done: we made connections between various organisations that will convert into future collaborations.

What’s next for UCL?

Well, glad you asked! At ARC we are starting to build an OSPO to provide Open Source guidance and support to research, education, and e-infrastructure projects through the whole university. At the moment we are scoping our vision and midterm goals, but hopefully soon we can advertise our plans to the rest of the university and the whole world. Would you like to be involved? Write to us at open.source@ucl.ac.uk.

Where can I read more about the event?

You can check the event highlights, the event recordings and reports from other attendees such as Nicole Martinelli at OpenSource.net, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at The New Stack and at The Register, Nithya Ruff at the Linux Foundation, and Henriette Litta at the Open Knowledge Foundation,

What?

At ARC I think it would be fair to say we strive to develop and improve not only on an individual level, but also on a group level. One of the ways we are doing this is through our RSE (Research Software Engineer) Initiatives – aiming to advance/evolve the RSE team to improve collaboration and delivery of the best possible software. They involve taking a more objective look at the current processes within our department and determining, by consensus, whether some of these processes need to be updated, or if a new solution should be devised. These are not overnight quick-fixes but rather, slow & steady progressions in the right direction.

We’ve focussed on 3 main areas: Professional Development, Good Practices and Knowledge Sharing.

As we’ve recently reached the 6 month mark of embarking on this journey, I thought I’d share an overview of each initiative’s aim and how we’re doing.

Professional Development

Notable people: Connor Aird, Stef Piatek & soon to be Paul Smith

This is about understanding how we currently decide to upskill (soft and technical) ourselves, what opportunities there are and how we can enable and support more/better opportunities.

The way we decided to figure out what people are doing regarding their professional (and to some degree personal) development was by interviewing them.

At the time of writing almost all the interviews have been completed and data gathered, being prepared for analysis.

Good Practices

Notable people: Haroon Chughtai, Kimberly Meechan & Emily Dubrovska

This looks at how much we engage with establishing and following best practices with technologies, languages and tools. We also want to determine whether there are areas where we could formalise/document this for future RSEs – a notable example is within the Python Tooling Community.

We decided it would be worth modelling the approaches of the Python Tooling Community and seeing whether there are other language/technology communities within ARC that don’t have best practice guidance but would benefit from it. This was done through a survey.

At the time of writing, the next groups of interest are Web Development and DevOps – both in the stages of requirements gathering/gaining an idea of what guidance could be documented or be built on, as well as looking into how it could best be delivered. 

Knowledge Sharing

Notable people: George Svarovsky & Amanda Ho-Lyn

This is about understanding how we currently share knowledge across the group – particularly project information – and how we can improve our current systems to be more usable and make information more accessible.

We decided to do a survey to see how people felt about how information is currently shared and also how much they actually felt they knew about different aspects. There were also some mentions of discontent about where information was posted and shared across a plethora of platforms.

At the time of writing, we have added a mini landing page to the ARC GitHub (note that you must be part of the org to see it) in an attempt to centralise relevant links to various places – this is a living thing and can be updated as necessary. We have also sent out a survey (thank you to those who took the time to complete it) and have plans to act on the results – see my post with more details about this (coming soon).

Thanks to everyone who’s been a part of this and continues to help us improve – especially to Asif who is forging the way ahead. And keep an eye out for more surveys! 😁

Over the last 15 months there has been much debate, hype and concern relating to capabilities of tools and platforms leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and media generators. Broadly termed Generative AI. The predominant narrative in Higher Education has been around the perceived threat to academic integirty and associated value to degrees. As such a lot of focus and discussion has focused on taught students, assessment design and “AI-proof” assessment. This has been coupled with concerns relating to the inability to reliably detect generated content, and the disproportionate number of false positives related to non-native English speakers text submitted to various platforms.

However, despite the proliferation of Generative AI enabled research tools and platforms, numerous workshops offering increased research output productivity and publications asking authors to declare whether or not these tools were used in producing outputs there has been limited discussion with relation to staff and research integrity.

Coupled with the publication of initial findings from a study on staff use of these tools by Watermayer, Lanclos and Phipps that included use to complete “little things like health and safety stuff, or ethics, or summarizing reports” and potential safety risks from fine-tuning models as reported in the Stanford Univeristy published policy briefing Safety Risks from Customizing Foundation Models via Fine-Tuning a workshop focusing on the interplay of Generative AI and research integrity and ethics was proposed as an AIUK Fringe event.

Research Integrity in an AI-Enabled World took place on Monday 25th March 2024. The aim was to explore how we think Generative AI enabled tools and platforms, could and should impact on the research process, and what the integrity and ethics implication are. Eventually aim would be to produce a policy white paper.

The event was organised so that there was a series of thought provoking talks in the morning, followed by a world-cafe style session in the afternoon. The event was held under the Chatham House Rule to enable open and frank discussion of the topic and arising issues.

The first set of talks predominantly focused on ethical issues. There were discussions on authorship, and the nature of authorship where multiple actors are involved e.g. training data creators, platform developers and prompters.  Bias in image generation, reinforcing misconceptions and stereotypes. Culminating in a talk on the University of Salfords evolving approach to Generative AI and research ethics.

The second set of talks was focused on current capabilities, limitations and implications of using Generative AI enabled tools in the research pipeline, predomintly focusing on qualitative analysis. This session included a discussion around evidence synthesis and the need to find more efficient methods whilst maintaining reliability and a breadth of knowledge, and different approaches using “traditional” machine learning approaches versus use of large language models. Enhanced capabilities of Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Systems and implications for methodological approaches were also introduced and discussed. The session concluded with a talk from Prof Jeremy Watson about the work currently being undertaken by the UK Committee on Research Integrity’s AI working group, of which he is member. Key themes currently under consideration by UKCORI are:

• Governance
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Skills and Training
• Public Understanding and Expectations
• Attribution and Ownership – IP, etc.
• Understanding Data Inputs and Models
• Need for Research in AI and Integrity

During the world-cafe session participants addressed the following questions:

• What do we mean by Research Integrity in an AI-Enabled Research Environment?
• Are there degrees of Research Integrity based on discipline and how embedded AI use is in the research process?
• What are the key ethical and legal considerations?

Including the following participant proposed questions:

• Generative AI is extremely good at in-filling uncertainty, where details of images become filled with bias. Should the responsibility of bias be equally on a prompter who enables this by omission?
• Recalibration of government and private funded RI in AI? Isn’t this the foundation of biases for RI?

Outputs from the world cafe session will be analysed over the next few weeks, and workshop participants were invited to contribute to the development of workshop outputs.

Key themes that emerged from the event include:

• Transparency
• Criticality
• Responsibility
• Fitness for purpose
• Data protection and privacy
• Digital divide – privilege and harms
• Training – education

The workshop was well received by participants, with the participants rate their overall experience of the event as 4.71 out of 5.

The speaker sessions were rated as very good by over 70% of participants. With the world cafe being mentioned as a highlight of the event.

As the proposer, organising and the host of the event I can’t help but still wonder:

• Can we ethically and with genuine integrity use tools which are fundamentally ethically flawed?
• Why are we accepting of these issues?
• How should we be pushing back?

I will leave you with these words from Arudhati Roy with which I opened the event: