Forum for planning and executing activities that support and enhance holistic collaboration across the breadth of the CASS community member organizations to sustain and advance our software libraries and tools as a curated, AI-ready portfolio, the working group hosts webinars, working meetings, and informal teatime discussions for anyone interested

Membership: Open (contact the chair to participate)

Meeting schedule: Webinars 12-1 pm ET on first Monday of even months, working meetings 12-1 pm ET on first Monday of odd months, Teatimes 4-4:30 pm ET on third Thursday each month

Chair: Michael A. Heroux (ParaTools)

Charter

Purpose: The CASS Software Ecosystem Working Group focuses on sustaining and improving collaboration across the CASS community and on promoting activities that support the scientific software ecosystem. Our efforts include coordinating CASS birds-of-a-feather events, promoting a curated portfolio of independently developed, interoperable, and interchangeable libraries and tools that enable the development and use of application codes in the pursuit of scientific discovery, including in particular the curation of the E4S website. We interpret the opportunities broadly to include community development, outreach, best practices in adopting and using the software portfolio, and more. We also track how the software ecosystem itself is changing as AI becomes a primary mode of access to our libraries and tools. Where scientists once installed and called our software directly, increasingly an AI agent does so on their behalf — as an explicit tool call, as an imported library inside agent-written code, embedded invisibly within a larger AI-driven workflow, or distilled into a surrogate model. This shift raises new questions for a curated portfolio: is our software discoverable and correctly invokable by agents, not just by expert humans; does documentation capture the expert judgment (solver choice, parameter selection, best practices) that agents need but that has historically lived only in the heads of experienced developers; and are agent skills — structured, shareable encodings of that judgment — becoming a companion artifact to the APIs and documentation we already curate. We work with member projects to explore what “AI for science readiness” means for a portfolio like ours, and to share emerging practices for making our software both agent-accessible and agent-trustworthy, without losing sight of the human contributors and users the portfolio has always served. Specific members include software coordinators from other product-owning software stewardship organizations.

Read the rest of the charter (the CASS by-laws require additional information in the charter)

Relationships to other working groups: The software ecosystem working group’s efforts often align with those of the Software Integration, Impact Framework, and User-Developer Experience (UDX) working groups. As AI-mediated access and agent skills become a shared concern across the consortium, we expect this work to increasingly intersect with UDX’s focus on how people (and now agents) install, adopt, and build on scientific software, and with Software Integration’s work on interoperability across the portfolio.

Expected lifetime: Standing

Expected membership: Open

Reporting expectations: Annually

Charter approval status: Active as of 2025-12-09

Additional resources