California's two largest public university systems—the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) —collectively serve over 750,000 students across 32 campuses. These universities also have a proven track record of building transformative open source projects and related technologies – like Jupyter , RISC-V, BSD Unix, CEPH and Apache Spark – just to name a few. These projects became part of the global digital infrastructure and illustrated the powerful impact of open source development in higher education. If UC and CSU were to take a more coordinated approach and create more avenues for collaboration, the impact to California and the wider open source ecosystem could be significant. By combining efforts, these two state systems could create a powerful engine for California's economic development and public good. This presentation will explore in detail the options for broadened collaboration between UC and CSU could look like and how these efforts could create tangible benefits to the state and local communities, as well as provide pathways for greater industry-academic collaboration on new technologies. This type of collaboration could provide real-world solutions to challenges faced by the state – such as: improving climate resilience; training students in real-world collaborative development practices; and making publicly-funded research immediately accessible to state agencies, nonprofits, and communities.
Cyril Oberlander is Dean of the Library at Cal Poly Humboldt and has championed collaborative innovation and open source software development. Stephanie Lieggi serves as Executive Director UCSC’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and leads the initiative to create a network of OSPOs across the UC system. Together, they bring complementary perspectives from both university systems—Oberlander's hands-on expertise in student engagement with open source at a CSU teaching institution and Lieggi's system-wide coordination experience across UC campuses. Their experience makes them well positioned to articulate how coordinated OS strategies between UC and CSU can amplify California's innovation ecosystem.
