The Open Source Software Club brings together talented student coders from across the University with academics who are looking to build a community and user base for their open source research software. We meet weekly in term time, and work on 2 different code bases, each one on alternate weeks.
About the Club
The club runs weekly during term time. For the Spring 2025 term, we’re working on the following two code bases:
- Loupe: a syscall usage analysis tool, implemented in Python and C, owned by Dr Pierre Olivier from the Department of Computer Science.
- NMRInversions: a numerical inversions tool for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance relaxation and diffusion experiments, implemented in Julia, owned by Aristarchos Mavridis from the Department of Chemical Engineering.
We welcome coders, technical writers, graphic designers, testers at all levels of experience plus anyone generally interested in how open source collaborative coding works. Come to learn, stay to help others learn!
Club meetings will be on the following dates:
| Date and time | Venue | Code base |
| Tuesday, 28th January 2025, 1.00pm-2.00pm | The Makerspace, MECD ground floor | Loupe |
| Monday, 3rd February 2025, 12.00pm-1.00pm | Collab 1, Kilburn Building, lower first floor | NMRInversions |
| Tuesday, 11th February 2025, 1.00pm-2.00pm | The Makerspace, MECD ground floor | Loupe |
| Monday, 17th February 2025, 12.00pm-1.00pm | G8 (Hyflex teaching space), Booth Street East Building | NMRInversions |
| Tuesday, 25th February 2025, 1.00pm-2.00pm | IT407, IT Building | Loupe |
| Monday, 3rd March 2025, 12.00pm-1.00pm | G8 (Hyflex teaching space), Booth Street East Building | NMRInversions |
| Tuesday, 11th March 2025, 1.00pm-2.00pm | IT407, IT Building | Loupe |
| Monday, 17th March 2025, 12.00pm-1.00pm | G8 (Hyflex teaching space), Booth Street East Building | NMRInversions |
| Tuesday, 25th March 2025, 1.00pm-2.00pm | IT407, IT Building | Loupe |
| Monday, 31st March 2025, 12.00pm-1.00pm | G8 (Hyflex teaching space), Booth Street East Building | NMRInversions |
| Tuesday, 29th April 2025, 1.00pm-2.00pm | IT407, IT Building | Loupe |
| Monday, 5th May 2025, 12.00pm-1.00pm | G8 (Hyflex teaching space), Booth Street East Building | NMRInversions |
Note that attendees for meetings in the MECD Makerspace will need to have completed the Makerspace induction training before attending
If you would like to join the club as a contributor, please fill in this short online form:
You’ll need to be logged in to your University of Manchester Office 365 account to be able to access the form. You can submit as many responses as you like, and can edit the responses once you’ve submitted them.
The club is led by Jan Machacek and Suzanne Embury.
Jan is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a former CTO and one of the brains who built the Disney Plus streaming service. He brings his technical expertise and his engaging and informal communication style to club meetings.
Suzanne Embury is a Reader in Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Director of Imago Software. She’ll be supporting club members in developing the skills needed to make quality contributions to open source code bases.
If you are a code base owner and are interested in receiving contributions from club members, contact Suzanne to discuss.
Benefits to Students
As a student club member you will get the chance to develop your software skills in areas not covered by introductory coding courses but that are highly valued by industry.
We’ll support you in building your portfolio of public open source contributions, taking you through the process step by step whatever your starting level. Together, we’ll take you through the different stages of interaction with open source code bases. We’ll run the code, help improve the documentation for first time users, as well as finding, reporting and fixing bugs. We can also add automated tests, run security checks and put in place best practices for managing a quality code base longer term.
The club provides a safe space for first-time contributors, with the code base owners on hand to answer questions and to help us mop up quickly and calmly should any small beginners mistakes be made.
The contributions you make through the club will be visible as part of your public GitHub record, and can be included on your CV and in job applications. Open source contributions can be a great way to show off your tech skills to prospective employers and to make your application stand out from the crowd. In a 2017 survey of open source contributors run by GitHub, over half of the respondents said that their open source contributions were somewhat important or very important in getting their current role.
Club members will also get the chance to work with academics on their research projects, to help their results to reach the people they are designed to benefit.
Benefits to Academic Code Base Owners
If your research results take the form of software, you may have open sourced your code base, or be thinking about doing so in the future. Publishing your code to a public code sharing system like GitHub is an easy and quick thing to do, but there is a huge gap between making your code public and creating an active, committed community of users and developers around your code base.
Potential users of code look at the level of activity on an open source code base before deciding whether to take the risk of downloading and using it. They’ll look at how recently the code base was updated, how quickly issues are resolved and whether there are good coding standards in place and helpful documentation.
In a 2017 survey of open source contributors, GitHub found that good documentation on a project is highly valued by potential users and contributors to a code base, but that the overall quality of documentation tends to be poor. Clear and helpful documentation is particularly important in reaching a diverse audience with your code, and in removing artificial barriers to contributions.
All of these things take time to put in place, but it is rare for a funded research project to have the resources to put into them, alongside the challenges of carrying out the research and publishing the results. Open sourcing the code base is often one of the final steps in a research project, before the budget comes to an end and staff leave for other projects.
We hope the Open Source Software Club will help you to continue to grow and build on your research code, by giving you access to a group of enthusiastic student coders at a range of abilities and experience levels. We’ll work with you to guide club members in assessing your code base, in finding bugs and problems, and in submitting suggested fixes. We can look at the aspects of the code base that will form a barrier for new users and can help you remove those barriers.
Pilot Club Meetings
In the summer of 2024, we ran two pilot meetings of the club to test out the idea. We ran a first pilot meeting of the Club in May 2024, with the help of 9 very enthusiastic undergraduate students from the Department of Computer Science. We followed this up with a 2nd pilot meeting in June. 19 students and members of staff attended.
Our thanks to everyone who helped us to pilot the club. The overwhelming message was that the club should go ahead. We have used your feedback to refine our approach. Club meetings will start in September.
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