Open Source Summit North America 2025

The University of California’s network of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) launched last year, bringing together six campuses (UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego) to support open source research, promote sustainability, and establish best practices within academic environments.
A key challenge in this effort is identifying and connecting open source projects across the system. Despite UC’s significant contributions to open source, there is no centralized way to track these efforts, making it difficult for researchers to find relevant projects, for institutions to assess impact, and for the broader community to engage with UC’s open source work.
To address this, the UC OSPO Network is developing the UC Open Source Repository Browser (UC ORB), a discovery tool designed to map and classify UC’s open source projects.
This talk will explore the process of building the UC ORB, from leveraging the GitHub API for data collection to integrating automated discovery with targeted outreach to the academic community. We will discuss the challenges of repository identification, compare similar approaches, and share lessons learned throughout the process.