Telling the stories of the people powering scientific open source software
In this Jupyter Book - hosted on GitHub pages at https://bids.github.io/people-scientific-oss - you'll find and contribute to - a collection of stories highlighting the people of scientific open source software.
Explore them by navigating through the list on the left side of this page 👈
This repository was created as a collaborative interview project for potential undergraduate interns at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS).
We lined up eight contributors to scientific open source software packages, and created "stub" pages for them in this book. We asked teams of 2-3 applicants to meet with one of the contributors and ask the following questions:
::: {hint} Recommended conversation prompts
- Q1: Can you tell us about an open source project you work on?
- Q2: How did you get started contributing to this project?
- Q3: What do you enjoy most about contributing to this project?
- Q4: What do you wish people knew about the "hidden work" of maintaining this project?
- Q5: What advice would you give to someone getting started contributing to scientific open source projects (generally, not necessarily this one)? :::
The applicants then worked as a team to open up a pull request to the people-scientific-oss GitHub repository with a write up of their conversation.
Our collaborative interview process was designed to give the undergraduates a feel for the type of research and software development we're interested in.
::: {tip} Assessment criteria
- Collaboration: can you work well with one of your peers, with BIDS staff and researchers, and with open source communities?
- Curiosity: can you understand scientific open source work, and ask clarifying questions?
- Communication: can you capture personal and research impact stories in person and online, synchronously and asynchronously (for example through pull requests on GitHub)? :::
This book is a Jupyter Book, powered by the MyST markdown document engine: https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.14805610
If you use this tool, please consider citing the team's overview publication Jupyter Book 2 and the MyST Document Stack, part of the 2025 SciPy Proceedings
Thank you to the Scientific Python community for their GitHub Action to add a GitHub status link to a CircleCI artifact, which allows us to review rendered content in pull requests.
All content is made available under the permissive 2-Clause BSD open source license.