Growing an Open-Source Research Software Project: Challenges and Lessons Learned from Data Snack

Developing a sustainable scientific open-source project presents a lot of challenges, especially in research domains where software development is not the primary focus. This includes establishing basic infrastructure like code-hosting or communication channels, building a community ecosystem around the project, and following best programming practices that ensure the project is REUSEable and FAIR. In this talk, we want to share our own experience from creating an open-source data harmonization and collaboration platform for Global Health research: the Data Snack initiative hosted at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany. As a team of two researchers coming from health sciences and computer science, we will touch on: the strength of interdisciplinary teams for RSE, offering data harmonization and collaboration services to incentivize FAIR research outputs, technical infrastructure requirements with a focus on digital sovereignty, programming and RSE best practices for FAIR-compliant software (FAIR4RS), licensing and financing considerations for sustaining an OSS project long-term, community engagement, within and beyond academia. Our aim is to discuss our key lessons learned from adopting RSE principles in a small interdisciplinary team, in the hope that it may benefit others. We will also highlight open questions and unresolved challenges, inviting discussion and exchange with the community.