The Open Source Program Office, UC Santa Cruz

How to add a new project idea to the Open Source Research Experience

Instructions for adding/updating a project

A project serves as the context for one or more project ideas. Each project is represented as a web page with project information and ideas. Projects and their updates are subject to review of the OSRE administrators.

• Option A: email OSRE administrators
• Option B (via git):
  • Fork git repository
  • Create content/project/osre24/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME directory or copy it from previous year's content/project/osre23/ORGANIZATION/PROJECTNAME
  • In that directory create/update index.md and the project's image (featured.png or featured.jpg)
  • In index.md fill in the frontmatter (see example):
    • Add the project's title in title:,
    • Date the project entry with date: and lastmod:, using one of the formats 2022-05-27 (day only), 2022-05-27T07:32:00 (with time), 1979-05-27T00:32:00-07:00 (UTC-7 timezone), or 2022-05-27T07:32:00Z (UTC timezone). Note that projects dated in the future will not display.
    • Include a list of authors:, using either names in quotes or user names (see below for instructions on how to add user names)
    • IMPORTANT: set a list of tags that include "osre23" and either "uc" or "reproducibility" or both, depending on whether your project has a mentor affiliated with a UC campus or associated national lab (LBL, LANL, LLNL), or is a Summer of Reproducibility project. Feel free to add additional tags.
    • Below the frontmatter start with a description of the project and include links to the project's webpage.
    • Add each project idea with level-3 header, i.e., ### ... and add a list of essential information that includes topics, skills, difficulty, size (175 vs 350 hours), and mentors.
  • Make a pull request.

Instructions for adding a mentor

Mentors are welcome to add information about themselves (see example):

• Option A: email OSRE administrators
  • Include name, title, affiliations, email, short bio, github profile (if applicable), whether you are UC or Summer of Reproducibility mentor (or both), and, optionally, photo, web page and social media links.
• Option B (via git):
  • Fork git repository (or combine with pull request of adding/updating a project above)
  • Create /content/authors/USER directory.
  • In that directory copy an _index.md file from another user and update it (see example)
    • Many icons are available (see documentation)
    • IMPORTANT: Under user_groups: add either - University of California Mentors or - Summer of Reproducibility Mentors (or both).
    • The bio and any other information goes below the frontmatter.

Posts, Projects, Authors, Reports, Events

The website has five "lists":

• Posts: (under content/post) include Programs (category: programs) named after their program name, and the OSPO Blog items (category: news) named after their posting date (yyyymmdd) with tags that determine whether news items are also appearing in OSRE News (tag osre) and SoR News (tag sor).
• Projects: (under content/project) are filed in a directory hierarchy with year at the top (e.g. osre22, osre23) and organization for each year. This directory hierarchy avoids name collisions of project names between years and organizations but the website build process does not assign any further meaning to it. Instead, tags determine in which year a project shows up (e.g. tag osre22 or osre23) and whether the project is a UC mentor project (tag uc) or a reproducibility project (tag reproducibility) or both. Additional tags describing project topics are encouraged and show up in the OSRE tag cloud (across all years and organizations).
• Authors (under content/authors) include administrators and OSRE mentors. There are three user_groups: Administration, University of California Mentors, and Summer of Reproducibility Mentors. Authors can belong to more than one group.
• Reports: (under content/report) are authored by OSRE contributors and will appear in the "Student Pages" section on the OSRE page.
• Events: (under content/event) lists the annual symposia (and possibly additional major events). The content/event/_index.md is showing the upcoming event (or the past event if there is no upcoming event yet) and a call-to-action button to register (or to watch the recording of the past event). The list items are past events named by their event date.

How to add a new annual edition of the Open Source Research Experience

To archive the current year (e.g. 2024) and start a new OSRE edition:

• Update /content/osre/index.md
• Copy /content/osre24 to /content/osre25
• Make the following updates within /content/osre25:
  • Update /content/osre25/intro.md
  • Rename and update content/osre25/osre25.md
  • For Student Pages:
    • In /content/osre25/studentpages.md
      • Update subtitle: "Go to [2024 student pages](/osre24/#studentpages)"
      • Update tag: [osre25]
      • Update "OSRE 2025" in body
    • In /content/osre24/studentpages.md update subtitle: "Go to [2023 student pages](/osre23/#studentpages) \nReturn to [2025 student pages](/osre25/#studentpages)"
  • For Projects:
    • In /content/osre25/projects.md
      • Update title: 2025 Projects
      • Update subtitle: "Go to [2024 projects](/osre24/#projects)"
      • Update tag: [osre25]
    • In /content/osre24/projects.md" update subtitle: "Go to [2023 projects](/osre23/#projects) \nReturn to [2025 projects](/content/osre25/#projects)"
  • For Timelines:
    • In /content/osre25/timeline.md
      • Update subtitle: "Go to [2024 timeline](/osre24/#timeline)"
      • In body update caption="Table: OSRE 2025 Timeline"
      • Update /content/osre25/timeline.csv
    • In /content/osre24/timeline.md update subtitle: "Go to [2023 timeline](/osre23/#timeline) \nReturn to [2025 timeline](/osre25/#timeline)"
• Copy /content/report/osre24/ucsc/admin/20231006-admin to /content/report/osre25/ucsc/admin/20231021-admin (or any other YYYYMMDD-admin name) and update tags (and any new instructions) in index.md of that directory:
  • Update title to OSRE 2025
  • Replace all osre24 with osre25
• Update /content/osre25/intro.md cta link url: '/osre25/#projects'
• Update /content/osredocs files for mentors, students, and mentor FAQs for OSRE 2025 (The OSRE documentation is updated in place -- use version control to find out about documentation of earlier years)
• Copy /content/sor24 to /content/sor25, make 2025 updates to /content/sor25, and update SoR links in /content/oser25/osre25.md to /sor25 and vice versa.

Website framework

This website is based on Hugo Blox, a website framework using Hugo that can be deployed with GitHub and Netlify. The theme of the OSPO website is the Research Group Theme.