Community Recommendations for Sustainable Scientific Software

A facilitated, roundtable discussion activity at the 2014 Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting elicited recommendations on community activities to improve practices for the sustainability of scientific software. These suggestions fell into three broad themes – (1) improving collaboration and community engagement through publications and presentations (2) developing workshops, training, and documenting best practices and (3) creating incentives and motivation with awards, citation and a reviewed software repository. In addition to the recommendations coming out of the roundtable activity, this paper highlights how community-led groups such as ESIP are key to move a sustainable software effort in its various forms from concept to reality.


Introduction
Communities are integral to the development and sustainability of scientific software (Howison and Herbsleb, 2014;Katz et al., 2014).The Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), a broad-based, distributed community of science data and information technology practitioners, has long recognized the risks of unsustainable practices related to data, informatics, and cyberinfrastructure.Over the last 15 years, ESIP has worked at the forefront of improving sustainable practices along the data lifecycle.
Given the ESIP community history and the natural connections between data management and software development (Lenhardt, et al, 2014), it is logical that more recently, the ESIP membership has turned to examine the issues related to software and the benefits that can be attained from the sustainability of scientific software.Starting in the summer of 2013, the ESIP meeting included a panel on the sustainable software topic.From this panel, ESIP formed a cluster devoted to science software.Over the last year, these efforts evolved to become the central theme of the ESIP 2014 Summer Meeting, in Copper Mountain, Colorado.As part of this meeting, the theme was carried from the plenary presentations to a roundtable, lunchtime discussion that leveraged the perspectives on sustainable software of over 300 Earth science community representatives, including data distributers, providers of data and information products, developers of tools for Earth science, modelers, and funders.The outcome of this discussion was captured and has been analyzed to identify recommendations from the community to improve practices for scientific software sustainability.

Methodology
The roundtable lunch discussion on the sustainability of scientific software was held during the main conference day after a series of plenary speakers focused on sustainable software issues.Prior to the roundtable lunch activity, 36 meeting contributors were asked to serve as discussion facilitators for the planned roundtable.The remaining attendees were each sequentially assigned, from an alphabetized list, to one of 36 tables.Facilitation included reading the questions to participants at the table and capturing ideas generated during the discussion.During the plenary session, the attendees were invited to join the roundtable lunch discussion and share their perspectives on the sustainability of scientific software.Each table contained instruction sheets and a form to collect the responses from the table.
Three sets of questions guided the discussion at each table.The first set pertained to the definition of sustainable scientific software and the second set elicited perspectives on various aspects of sustainable scientific software.The third set of questions requested recommendations for activities that the ESIP community might consider for the near future to improve practices for the sustainability of scientific software.The initial results, described here, reflect responses to the third question that participants have recommended for the ESIP community to improve scientific software sustainability practices.

Initial Results
We received responses from 25 of the 36 invited tables.Initial analysis revealed the following actionable activities recommended for the ESIP community to improve the sustainability of scientific software.It is anticipated that ESIP contributors, including ESIP's Science Software Cluster, will take up some of these recommendations going forward.

Collaboration
The participants recommended new activities and co-sponsorship of activities to encourage ESIP members to collaborate with other groups on the sustainability of scientific software, including groups such as the International Council for Science Committee on Data (CODATA), the World Data System (WDS), the Research Data Alliance (RDA) EarthCube, and COOPEUS.Participants also recommended inviting scientists and end users to attend ESIP meetings and share their perspectives on software sustainability.

Publications and Presentations
Activities were recommended for the ESIP community to increase awareness, visibility and understanding of scientific software sustainability issues within the Earth science community.Participants recommended producing publications and presentations to inform the Earth science community about these issues, suggesting that community members propose AGU sessions focused on software sustainability, offering conceptual information that is less technical.Likewise, submitting papers to Eos and to the WSSSPE also were recommended to inform the Earth science community about the importance of scientific software sustainability.

Workshops, Training & Best Practices
The participants recommended raising awareness of software sustainability and facilitating different levels of training.Suggestions included developing training modules for simple software lifecycle skills and learning modules to improve understanding about the sustainability of scientific software, similar to the Data Management Training Modules developed by the ESIP Federation (Duerr and Hoebelheinrich, 2012).Participants also recommended the broader research community to the importance of sustainable software.The roundtable activity created opportunities to operationalize sustainable software concepts.
In this paper our goal has been to describe recommendations observed for improving the sustainability of science software.These conclusions grow from the ESIP community focus on sustainable science software as reflected in the ESIP Summer 2014 meeting.Even though the participants largely represented the Earth science informatics community, these recommendations also apply to other communities and we forward to making those connections.