Institutional Support for Experimental Systems Research

Open source software communities and their strategies and techniques has immense potential to amplify the impact of experimental systems research. The Center for Research in Open Source Software (cross.ucsc.edu) since I founded it in 2015 has successfully demonstrated this potential by raising $2.3 million in membership fees and creating the Skyhook Data Management incubator project that has now evolved into a community platform for addressing the challenges of the computational I/O stack and lowering barriers for industry to adopt solutions to these challenges. Some of the open source products of SkyhookDM research are now mature enough to require an open source ecosystem in order to facilitate their adoption. However much of the work to create that infrastructure is outside the job description of researchers. That is, we need staff software engineers and community architects to build this infrastructure.

In this talk I will give a quick overview of how CROSS v2 is planning to support paths to open source ecosystems by adapting its funding model, governance, and incubator.