Lessons from Building the Spack Open Source Community

Successful open source projects share a number of product, communication, and governance characteristics that are key to building a sustainable community. Spack is a flexible software package manager with over 700 contributors world-wide. Its community addresses the challenges of building, installing, and testing multiple versions of software and their dependencies across primarily supercomputing platforms. Sustainability is achieved through efforts to balance a well-structured code base with communications and outreach activities. This presentation will delve into the relevant project characteristics; discuss lessons learned; and describe plans for improvements.A talk presented at the SIAM CSE21 conference, MS94+MS125: Building Sustainable Software Communities and Sustainable Software.