Dr Emily Kahl1
1Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Effective community management is crucial for maintaining active and vibrant open-source software projects. Open-source research software presents great opportunities for scientific collaboration, but also poses
special challenges for community management and engagement, such as the relatively high turnover of developers in an academic environment and conflict between academic performance metrics and software maintenance duties.
This presentation will provide an overview of lessons learned from releasing the “AMBiT” program for relativistic atomic structure calculations as open-source. I will discuss tools and processes we developed to make community management feasible with a two-person developer team, as well as techniques we used to promote engagement and discoverability within the wider atomic physics community. Finally, I will contrast our approach for managing relatively small research software projects with current practices used by large research software codebases with thousands of users and discuss challenges research software projects must navigate as they grow in complexity and number of users.
Biography:
Dr Emily Kahl works as a scientific programmer in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland, where she develops and maintains numerical codes for molecular simulations. Her two focuses are the development of computational chemistry software for massively-parallel computer architectures and on improving the quality and uptake of open-source software in science.
Emily completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales. She was awarded her PhD in physics in 2021 for a thesis titled “High-performance computing and its applications to atomic structure physics”. She joined the Bernhardt group at AIBN in 2020, where she works with researchers in chemistry and materials science to develop and maintain software for nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations.