Inaugural Run of the Open Source Community Collider a Smashing Success!

Thank you to everyone who joined us for OSSci’s inaugural Open Source Community Collider! We had 20 attendees out of 70 registered, and I feel confident in suggesting we all had a great time zooming around the collision rings.

Participants engaged in a series of 4-minute (increased to 5 minutes after the first round) one-on-one sessions where we met a diverse group of individuals. I personally met folks working in metadiscourse, contributing to tools for fluid simulations on the ISS, people that want to see their projects join NumFOCUS, people releasing AI frameworks and running large hackathons, someone that met their current SO on GitHub, people that very much agree with OSSci's mission to reconnect researchers with engineers, and folks that are beyond thankful for the support NumFOCUS gives their projects... they enjoy getting to work on the software and not the bureaucracy that NumFOCUS abstracts away from them.

Several participants used our prompt questions to frame their rapid discussions. They were:

• What brings you to the collider?

• Do you contribute to an open source project?

• Do you contribute to research?

• Have you ever been to a PyData event?

After the collisions, we spent 15 minutes with all the participants taking feedback and discussing how to move forward (everyone thought this was very much worth their time, and wants to participate again).

We also all joined the OSSci slack to stay in touch! Want that invite? Join an OSSci interest group or the collider calls!

What’s Next?

Based on those discussions, we’re excited to increase the energy of these collisions going forward!

For next month we will

• Keep the collision time to around 5 minutes instead of the planned 4.

• Host two events per month, accounting for different time zones:

  • September 13th at 7am ET: Register here

  • September 27th at 2pm ET: Register here

  You’re encouraged to join both to meet your community peers from around the world!

• Proactively reach out to invite more diverse communities!

• Add a shared whiteboard on which we can all doodle and communicate.

• Provide access to a shared document to jot down notes, ideas, and contact information during the event.

Get Involved:

• Register for September’s Community Colliders!

  • September 13th at 7am ET: Register here

  • September 27th at 2pm ET: Register here

• We encourage you to invite others from your communities. Bring a friend or two and be the biggest element in the chamber!

• NOTE: By registering, you’re consenting to receive one follow-up email with a summary of the past event and details on the following event.

Thank you for helping us make the first OSSci Open Source Community Collider a success. We look forward to seeing you at our future events as we continue to build connections and drive collaboration across the open source and open science communities.

Mark your calendars and register for September 13th and 27th—see you there!