Open@RIT

Open@RIT is dedicated to fostering the collaborative engine of "Open Across The University" for Faculty, Staff and Students. Its goals are to discover, and grow the footprint, of RIT’s impact on all things Open including, but not limited to, Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Science, Open Hardware, Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons licensed efforts, what we like to refer to in aggregate as Open Work. 

Its charter was approved by the Provost in June of 2020 and it was established under the Office of the Vice-President of Research in August of 2020.

Faculty and Staff: Open@RIT provides support for the Open Work already pursued by RIT Faculty and Staff, and mentoring for those interested in getting started in it. We currently offer our Open@RIT Fellowship program for University projects and a variety of services to support the writing and execution of research and project proposals with requirements to release the work as Open. 

We're developing our recommendations for best practices in releasing and promoting Open Work and the evaluation of Open work in annual review, tenure and promotion. We will back these recommendations with a program and services for registering your work with Open@RIT, supporting the collection of metrics and analytics to use in those processes.

In the fall we'll be offering a collection of informational resources on working in the Open.

Students: Open@RIT's roots lie in the formal and informal educational opportunities for undergraduate students which include...

• RIT’s courses and Minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture
• Our Co-Op program, LibreCorps
• The experiential education programs of  FOSS@MAGIC (formerly FOSS@RIT) that has weekly meetings and helps students pursue and show project work at Maker Faire Rochester, Imagine RIT and, when funding allows, academic and industry conferences.

Research: Open@RIT also does formal and applied research in Open Work that has included qualitative studies of Open communities, FOSS education and the creation of Open Platforms for Deaf education. research to research page.

Service to the Profession: Open@RIT is an Associate Member of the Linux Foundation and its director serves on the Steering Committee of the ToDo Group.  The office is also active in IEEE SA Open, OSPO++, CHAOSS Community, Sustain OSS and the IGDA Open Source SIG.

Open@RIT Monthly Meetings

March 10, April 14, May 12
Second Wednesday of the month
11am via Zoom
Sign Up

Upcoming Presentations and Papers:

csv,conf,6
Birds of a Feather session: How can we use data on Open Work for Tenure and Promotion?
May 4^th UTC 6:00

Recent:

Teaching Open Source Colloquium
April 16^th

Conference Lightning Talk: Open@RIT, Our Model for an Academic OSPO
FOSSASIA, March 14^th, 2021

Conference Panel: The Culture of Open Source between Institutions
FOSS BackStage, February 1012, 2021

All Events

Director 

Stephen Jacobs

Professor

School of Interactive Games and Media

Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences

stephen.jacobs@rit.edu

Stephen Jacobs is a professor with the School of Interactive Games and Media and an interdisciplinary scholar who works in several different areas that often overlap including Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture. Digital Humanities, Game Design and History and Interactive Narrative. His Open Work has been funded by The Ford Foundation, UNICEF Innovation, Red Hat Inc, Northern Telecom and AT&T. Professor Jacobs received the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentoring for 2019-2020. He has held the position of Visiting Scholar at The Strong National Museum of Play since 2009.

Assistant Director

Michael Nolan

Assistant Director Open@RIT

Research

mpnopen@rit.edu

Mike Nolan serves as the Assistant Director of Open@RIT. A former RIT alum, he went on to work in the tech industry at companies such as GIPHY and Mozilla. He then proceeded to work in the humanitarian aid sector abroad (Jordan & UK) for organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF. He continues to pursue his mission of technology and social good by helping lead RIT's open programs center.

LibreCorps Co-op Students

Advisory Board