Rene Gassmoeller, CIG UC Davis

In the last decade geodynamic software projects have increasingly incorporated state-of-the-art technical best practices like version control, documentation, and continuous integration into their development cycle. However, many projects still struggle to create and grow an active and welcoming user/developer community, and there exists little documentation on what makes a scientific software community successful.

In this CIG webinar I will summarize the work of my Better Scientific Software fellowship (https://bssw.io/), which collects typical social challenges and potential solutions that arise during the evolution of a scientific software project. Aimed at current and prospective software maintainers and community leaders, I will discuss topics such as building and maintaining a welcoming community atmosphere, overcoming skepticism of sharing science and software, mediating between users working on conflicting topics or publications, and providing credit and growth opportunities for community members. Finally, I hope to initiate a conversation about what makes communities successful so that we can earn from each other and improve scientific software together. CIG has promoted best software practices for years (https://github.com/geodynamics/best_practices), and can act as a discussion forum for what we think the future of scientific software development should look like.

[All 2019-20 webinars] [YouTube]

1. Gassmoeller
2. webinar
3. 2020