Come Join the Tapis Open Source Ecosystem!

Why Join Tapis?

Tapis transforms scientists' productivity by facilitating the discovery, access, and use of powerful cyberinfrastructure capabilities via APIs and services. By offering secure and robust APIs, software development kids (SDKs), Jupyter interfaces to HPC, HTC, Cloud, IoT, and storage resources, Tapis reduces the complexity to accomplish science and improves the time to science in a production-quality environment.

Tapis has been awarded a POSE Phase I Award: Tapis Advancing Collaborative Open Source (TACOS) - Award #2229614 to grow and strengthen the engagement of developer communities to provide long-term sustainment. These engagements will look at opportunities to shift the community from not only being users of Tapis but also contributors to Tapis.

The project team believes deeply in the power and importance of an open, inclusive, community driven approach to software development, and the POSE program will enable us to create inroads to direct engagement by the developer community. By making Tapis an OSE, going beyond source code, Tapis will evolve to an ecosystem of components that the community can contribute to at any level of expertise. To this end the project will engage beyond existing user base and pursue community members amongst teaching intensive institutes and EPSCOR communities via student mentoring and hackathons to broaden outreach and create opportunities to contribute to the Tapis ecosystem.

As an open-source project with an active user community, Tapis depends strongly on the core, funded, development team to support and maintain the software which places limitations on what it can accomplish.

Tapis Open Source Ecosystem Guiding Principals

• Agile Processes: An iterative process to project management and software development to help the team deliver value to the users of the software.
• Early & Often Releases: This is a development strategy focused on frequent and early releases in order to create a rapid feedback loop between testers, users, and developers. This along with the agile process above will promote software quality that meets user needs and expectations.
• Collaboration: When the community is free to contribute and collaborate, work can be enhanced in ways that an individual cannot solely on their own. The OSE will create opportunities to collaborate on problems and solve them together. This will enable more effective decisions and a more impactful project.
• Transparency: A cornerstone of an open-source ecosystem is having transparency in order to promote the ability to share ideas, collaborate together, and build upon existing systems to make new discoveries. Making effective decisions, and understanding how decisions are made and affect other components and the project as a whole will be important. Throughout the OSE, all roadmaps, design decisions, products, services, bugs, meetings, etc. will be shared publicly to ensure transparency into both the governance and the project itself.
• Inclusivity: The objective is to structure an OSE governance that effectively serves and engages all people and considers policies and processes that are accessible, accountable, and responsive to all members.
• Shared Community: A community is formed when different people unite around a common purpose. Creating an OSE focused on shared values that guide decision making, community goals that supersede individual interests. By combining the principles above, the OSE will ensure that shared community values are communicated throughout the OSE.

How Can You Help?

• Join our Tapis Slack Community 
• Lead a Tapis Working Group
  • These will be open-ended groups that enable the community to have a direct impact on Tapis. The goal of working groups is to create healthy, highly functioning, and collaborative groups.
  • Groups will be composed of developers, users, and contributors interested in advancing a Tapis component and contributing to that component
  • Contact us if you are interested in leading a working group around DevOps + Deployment Automation, Streaming Sensor Support, Tooling (Programming language SDKs), Notebooks + Tutorials, Security, AI, Documentation, and Workflows.
  • If you have your own Working Group suggestion reach out to us!
• Contribute to the Tapis software via GitHub Issues
• Contribute to our documentation
• Join a future training or hackathon

As the Tapis Open Source Ecosystem matures there will be additional ways to contribute to Tapis. For more information please reach out and join the Tapis Slack Community.