ITHAKA has a mission to make knowledge widely available, accessible, and sustainable. This mission runs parallel to the open source approach to software development. In making software, systems, and methodologies public, organizations enable others to build on their successes as well as critically examine these artifacts for bugs or security flaws.

The collaborative nature that open source strives toward acts as a tide that raises all ships; the community can produce improvements that benefit everyone. These software changes are tracked over time and the historical record that arises also acts as an audit trail for reproducibility or as a catalyst for someone hoping to learn how something is done.

Our front-end developers that work on JSTOR consume data from a myriad of back-end systems, from those we manage in-house for authentication and search to third-party APIs for fetching data from Wikipedia. As the list of services we interact with grew over the last few years, we found it difficult to manage the services, let alone all the endpoints we communicate with in each of them. We built a Python project, ithaka/apiron, in order to ease this burden. Sometime soon after that, we decided that apiron might be useful enough to others to warrant publication and got to work on all the legal and marketing threads involved.

Since open sourcing apiron, it’s seen moderate but intriguing interest from the Python community. Jeff Triplett, a Director of the Python Software Foundation, was the first third-party contributor to the apiron project. Jeff lives in Lawrence, KS, the birthplace of the Django web framework that we make heavy use of on JSTOR. He organizes the DjangoCon US conference as the president and co-founder of the Django Events Foundation North America.

Another third-party contributor, who we know only by the cryptic handle teffalump, used apiron to build a Python package for communicating with servers managing DICOM, a standard for working with medical imaging records. Excitingly, their work went on to be used by folks in the Brown University Behavioral and Neuroimaging team.

One beautiful consequence of the freedom of open source software is that you never quite know where it will end up. We built apiron to improve how we talk to a search service, and already it’s spread to use cases we couldn’t have imagined at the outset if we’d tried. Exploring these use cases as opportunities to learn will ultimately help us improve our software and ourselves.

As ITHAKA publishes software that generates reach and impact, those we engage with may develop an interest in working with us more directly, perhaps as collaborators or even as employees It’s also a new way to pursue our mission to expand access to knowledge (in all its forms).

If you’re curious about the steps involved in open sourcing projects, my experience with it, how to effectively manage an open source project, or are thinking about using apiron, please leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter at @easyaspython!