Open Source Process and Experience at NASA, the CCMC Story

Since its inception in 2000, the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) has followed the ideals of making its ‘data‘ and services readily accessible and transparent to the community. Many of these principles have since become a cornerstone of community standards and guidelines, such as Open Science, FAIR, and others.  At the CCMC, it is one of our mission goals to be a hub for collaborative development to advance modeling capabilities, stability, accessibility, and accuracy within the heliophysics community.  In order to support that goal, the CCMC has always adopted and supported the FAIR principle by making the majority of the CCMC hosted ‘data’ and software open, while also complying with restrictions imposed by agency policies and intellectual property as well as privacy rights held by model developers and users of the CCMC services.  Since 2018, we have followed the NASA software release procedures and have made a few of the CCMC software ‘open’ under NASA.  As of 2023, the CCMC is managing 3 software projects that are under the NASA public GitHub repository with an approved NASA Open Source Software Agreement (NOSA).  In this talk, we will share the steps all NASA employees including contractors must follow to open source their NASA owned code.  What is the CCMC approach on deciding when to open source a software project and what we have learned along the way.  Most importantly, what is our experience once the project is ‘open’.