Thank you deeply to all of you who participated in our community interview process last year. This email serves as our first occasional newsletter. If you wish to receive future newsletters (aiming for once per quarter) please subscribe! If you don't, you won't receive any further emails from us.

As a reminder, Open Ocean Software is a new initiative to support building ecosystems around open source software for marine robots (and related topics) to improve technical quality, security, maintainability, documentation, interoperability, and to build a vibrant human community. In short, we are working to support you and your projects.

Our first big event! Community Day UK on Friday, 4th September 2026

Open Ocean Software would like to invite you to our first community day at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, where you can expect focused talks, in-depth discussions, and plenty of time for networking in a single-track format. This is also your chance to have early feedback on the goals and implementation of the Open Ocean Software organization.

This workshop will take place on Friday, 4th September 2026, directly following the IEEE OES AUV Symposium, also held in Southampton.

We invite you to submit an abstract for a technical talk in one of two tracks: lightning talks and standard talks.

For more details, including abstract submission, preliminary agenda, and registration, see: oceansoft.org/community-day-uk-2026

Online Forum

We heard from many of you that you wanted a searchable, public, persistent forum to discuss marine robotics and related topics online. To that end we have created a Discourse forum at forum.oceansoft.org and we are excited to invite you to join in the discussion.

Please register, drop in and share what you're working on or excited about at the Showcase. No project is too small or too new to share.

Getting involved

Some easy ways to get involved:

• Join us at Community Day UK, especially if you're already planning to attend the AUV conference.
• Post on our forum and sign up for email digests for relevant categories.
• Take our Community Pulse Survey so we can better serve your specific needs.
• Join the ROS Maritime Working Group meetings on the last Tuesday of each month from 4-5pm US Eastern Time. These include a talk by a member of the community which are quite relevant to non-ROS users as well.

What's next

• Some of us will be at MOOS-DAWG 2026 in Cambridge, MA, USA at the end of July.
• We're writing a paper to present at the AUV Symposium in September which will include our interview findings and technical plans.