Summary

There are many different open science and open-source projects and tools, but no efficient way to match project creators with interested collaborators who possess the skills required to contribute. Your challenge is to create a solution that will help people who are looking for open-source projects to work on and project creators who need skilled contributors to find each other and communicate.

Background

NASA is making a long-term commitment to build an inclusive open science community over the next decade. Open-source science is a commitment to openly sharing software, data, and knowledge (algorithms, papers, documents, ancillary information) as early as possible in the scientific process. It is also an opportunity to involve a wider range of people in research, including those from outside academia.

Open research initiatives can involve a variety of participants. Some open research projects involve participants who don’t possess specialized expertise, but other projects require contributors with specific skills. While it’s challenging for those who run open science projects to find people to participate, it’s also challenging for people who want to participate to find those projects. There are well-known, large, open-source software projects (e.g., Python, Linux) and well-known places to find open data (especially from NASA!), but currently, there is no place online for project creators and skilled participants to find each other, mingle, and foster professional relationships to work on interesting open research projects.

Objectives

Your challenge is to create a tool that will enable open science project creators and skilled potential contributors to identify one another and communicate. Project creators will need to explain their projects and the type of collaborators (and level of expertise) they are looking for, together with the expected scope of work. Individuals looking to participate in open science projects will need to list the skills they can bring to a project and the types of projects they are seeking, and indicate when they are available to work. Think about how your tool will enable project creators to search for collaborators based on the skills and level of expertise they’re looking for. And how will individuals search for projects to work on based on their interests?

As a bonus: can your tool proactively suggest project creator-collaborator pairings based on the information each party has entered?

Once an individual and project creator are matched, how will your tool provide a means for them to communicate privately? Will your tool look something like the common job networking sites out there, or something entirely different? Be creative!

Potential Considerations

You may (but are not required to) consider the following:

Remember that Space Apps judges cannot download executable files. The tool you develop will run in a web browser, requiring the web page and associated code to be hosted on a server. (See the Resources tab at the top of the page for suggested ways to search for information about free web hosting services.)
- Research the repository that your team is using to ensure it offers web hosting. As an example, try searching for the repository name and “pages” or “web pages.” So if “foo” was the name of the repository, then try searching for “foo pages” or “foo web pages.”
Consider the desire for privacy from platform users; no personal information (names, e-mail addresses, etc.) should be publicly visible unless the user explicitly permits it.
Not everyone will want to create an online account to use your tool, so login credentials could be handled through third parties (e.g., Open Researcher and Contributor ID [ORCID], Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).
Tagging systems, skill lists, and other such ‘finite’ elements often become degraded over time or are too general to use effectively. How will your system make skillset matching flexible while avoiding these problems?

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page.

2023 NASA Space Apps Challenge

A Marketplace for Open Science Projects