SIAM CSE21 Minisymposium: Building Sustainable Software Communities and Sustainable Software

Software is at the heart of computational science and engineering research. While much software is produced for personal use or by a small team, many tools, libraries, and applications achieve more wide-spread use and contributions from large developer communities. Indeed, this growth is a common aspiration of newly-launched software projects. This minisymposium will bring together speakers from a variety of software communities and scientific disciplines representing different types of packages, different sizes of software projects, and different stages of the software life-cycle. They will address questions around how to create sustainable software, how to maintain them over time, and how to create sustainable communities of developers and users around the software. We hope that the minisymposium facilitates discussions about best practices and initiates conversations about how to implement and improve these practices to make scientific software better.