Educational Institutions
Colleges, universities, and any schools that teach software-related skills of any kind.
Relationships With Other Aspects
Timescale aspect changes: long,
Scope of aspect: medium,
Relationship with other aspects: government, project, research,
Primary focus: research
Sustainability Aspects
Schools train future contributors and leaders, meaning changes here take a long time to show up in the ecosystem.
Universities research long-term and complex topics, so make a great partner for sustainability work.
Researchers are already working on deep sustainability topics across the spectrum.
Educational Institutions
Education’s importance to sustainability is everywhere: from core STEM concepts teaching in lower grades, to traditional university curricula related to software or technology fields, to non-traditional places that people can learn about software or open source concepts.
- Research Institutions are starting to work on real research into sustainability topics specifically in the open source space.
- Contributions Many academic groups find that contributing their code to open source directly helps them meet scientific goals around sharing information.
- Grant Funding Higher education institutions often manage grant funding of a variety of projects, and some institutions have policies to ensure their work is made open source in some way.
- Education Institutions are starting to truly teach open source concepts - not just software engineering, but how open source is a process and method for driving innovation in distributed communities.
Sustainability Questions
Academic researchers have many ways to coordinate, amplify, and discover research. How do we build more connections with contributors/maintainers, foundations, and companies to make use of sustainability research?
How sustainable are academic software projects and data sets? Are there ways to help academics build sustainable practices into their code work as well as their current research papers?
Ideas and References
- Teaching Open Source wiki about curriculum sharing
- The Sustainability of Open Source Commons review of multiple studies on FOSS and Ostrom