Collaborative Working Sessions - Engaging academia

Reproducible Builds Summit 2025 Thursday - Engaging Academia

• make academic research
• often academics go too esoteric
• academics need credit in the official ways: publishing papers, conferences, etc.

get these groups working together, what are the requirements?

• industry (Linux Foundation, etc)
• academia
• community projects (Debian, F-Droid, etc)

NSF SafeOSE $1.5 mil projects

• other funding strategies, like small directs contracts

• small, quick funds like NLnet, Sovereign Tech Fund, etc.

• publication-driven (academia) vs practitioner-driven (industry, FOSS communities, etc)

• academics need prestige and ranked events
• lots of practitioners want to avoid that whole scene
• how to make an event that works for all?

What are examples that work at mixing academia and practitioners?

• some academic conferences work to include practitioners
  • https://scored.dev/
  • these often aren’t ranked high enough for some academics
• some practitioner conferences are well known:
  • https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/
• worked but became too academic, but might work
  • https://www.acsac.org/
• academics don’t want to get scooped, because of “publish or perish”
• FOSS communities view it as a goal to have more people working on the same things

Idea: get NSF TIP program managers to endorse the conference in some important way. This will grab the attention of top academic researchers and might better bootstrap the event in the eyes of academics.

Other key people to bring in to make critical mass in an event:

• funders: National Science Foundation (NSF), Open Tech Fund (OTF)
• government/regulators: auto regulators, European Commission

CORE ranking system is key measure for some universities, they only want to submit to well ranked events https://www.core.edu.au/conference-portal

• How can we include small universities? There are lots of them around the world, they often work directly with practitioners already. They have a lot more flexibility and are much cheaper to fund.

SATML https://satml.org/

Let’s try to organize something at https://scored.dev/