Open Ocean Software Community Day UK (last Friday at the NOC)

What a great week! After an incredible three days at the IEEE OES AUV Symposium, we held an engaging and lively Community Day, where we strongly believe everyone went home having picked up new ideas and made new professional connections.

A few highlights from the day:

• On discoverability: "we love vintage stores but they are being shattered by the big companies. No one knows where they are. ... It's the same issue [for open source software]".
• On a suggested journal for marine robotics OSS: "[I raised the] journal idea, because that's the currency of academia. If you don't get a publication out of it, people just wouldn't submit their projects."
• Differing opinions on the importance of security in academic software:
  • "As a scientist, [if] I have some phytoplankton to look at, it's really not my concern to make sure that whatever I produce is unhackable..." versus
  • "A lot of us in academia have contracts that actually go to defense. [...] We cannot say, this is not relevant to us. It is actually very relevant to us."
• On manufacturer drivers:
  • "When we're writing code for a sensor driver, is that ever really the research that any of us are doing [...]? As a community, do we have enough influence to actually start talking to the people who manufacture these devices and say, hey, screw you, give us a sensible thing that everybody can use?" versus
  • "... when I get a new sensor with a sensor driver from the manufacturer, I run the driver and I unplug the instrument and plug it back in and see if it keeps working. And so far there have been zero successful runs with the manufacturer-provided sensor driver."

And here's a visual summary (generated using Gemini Notebook against the transcript) of the topics raised by the community during the afternoon Town Hall sessions:

For details, see the slides, transcripts, summaries, and more in Google Drive.

Huge thanks from all of us to the National Oceanography Centre for hosting.

Stay Engaged

• We'll be holding a Town Hall at OCEANS in Monterey, CA on Wed 23rd Sep from 8:30-10am as part of the technical program. This event, "Future directions in Open Source for the Ocean," will feature a panel discussion led by Professor Hanu Singh. Please join us!
• Join in the ongoing discussion on the future of underwater networking and encryption on the forums: M4P.

What else is new?

• On 31st August, we submitted a Track 2 proposal to NSF PESOSE, one possible route for continued funding.
• We attended MOOS-DAWG26 and gave two talks.