September 28-29, 2015, Boulder, CO
(plus September 30 for optional report writing)

(Co-located with 10th Gateway Community Environments (GCE15) Workshop)

WSSSPE3 will organize self-directed teams that will collaborate prior to and during the workshop to create vision documents, proposals, papers, and action plans that will help the scientific software community produce software that is more sustainable, including developing sustainable career paths for community members. These teams are intended to lead into working groups that will be active after the workshop, if appropriate, working collaboratively to achieve their goals, and seeking funding to do so if needed.

Potential WSSSPE3 team activities, based on the breakout groups in WSSSPE2 and additional community suggestions, are:

  • Development and Community
    • Writing a white paper/review paper about best practices in developing sustainable software
    • Documenting successful models for funding specialist expertise in software collaborations
    • Creating and curating catalogs for software tools that aid sustainability (perhaps categorized by domain, programming languages, architectures, and/or functions, e.g., for code testing, documentation)
    • Documenting case studies for academia/industry interaction
    • Determining effective strategies for refactoring/improving legacy scientific software
    • Determining principles for engineering design for sustainable software
    • Create a set of guidance giving examples of specific metrics for the success of scientific software in use, why they were chosen, what they are useful to measure, and any challenges/pitfalls; then publish this as a white paper
  • Training
    • Writing a white paper on training for developing sustainable software, and coordinating multiple ongoing training-oriented projects
    • Developing curriculum for software sustainability, and ideas about where such curriculum would be presented, such as a summer training institute
  • Credit
    • Hacking the credit and citation ecosystem (making it work, or work better, for software)
    • Developing a taxonomy of contributorship/guidelines for including software contributions in tenure review
    • Documenting case studies of receiving credit for software contributions
    • Developing a system of awards and recognitions to encourage sustainable software
  • Publishing
    • Developing a categorization of journals that publish software papers (building on existing work), and case studies of alternative publishing mechanisms that have been shown to improve software discoverability/reuse e.g., popular blogs/websites
    • Determining what journals that publish software paper should provide to their reviewers (e.g., guidelines, mechanisms, metadata standards, etc.)
  • Reproducibility and testing
    • Building a toolkit that could allow conference organizers to easily add a reproducibility track
    • Documenting best practices for code testing and code review
  • Documentation
    • Develop landing pages on the WSSSPE website (or elsewhere) that enable the community to easily find up-to-date information on a WSSSPE topic (e.g., software credit, scientific software metrics, testing scientific software)

Call for Participation / Actions:

  1. Save the dates for WSSSPE3: 28-29 September, 2015, Boulder, CO
  2. Get started on discussing and planning for team sessions by commenting on them at https://github.com/danielskatz/WSSSPE/issues (note: they are listed as GitHub issues, so you will need to signup for a GitHub account if you don’t have one)
  3. Join the WSSSPE mailing list to be sure to get further information on WSSSPE3 – via http://bit.ly/wssspe-list