Inessa Pawson
Inessa is building bridges between people, open source software, and open science. Over the years, she has launched and continues to support several educational initiatives focused on widening the open source contributor pipeline. Inessa is Open Source Program Manager at OpenTeams and guest faculty at University of Connecticut. She also serves on the NumPy Steering Council and the pyOpenSci Advisory Board. Inessa is perpetually fascinated by incentive design, collaborative intelligence, and jazz.
NumPy, PyOpenSci, OpenTeams
Open Source Program Manager
inessapawson
Session
In Fall 2025, the UConn School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering launched Open Source Experiences, an elective course developed in partnership with six NumFOCUS-supported projects (napari, BiocPy, Blosc, MNE-Python, mlpack, JuliaHub). The course embedded students directly into active open source communities, where they contributed to the codebases, collaborated with project maintainers, and learned about community-driven open source software development. In this talk, we will share the lessons learned from piloting this collaboration model, and how these experiences benefit students, open source and open science communities, and educators alike. Attendees will take away actionable insights for integrating open source contributions into their own classrooms and programs.