Growing the OpenSSL Academic Community: Collecting Ideas
Nikolas Gauder Sat 4 Apr 2026 7:21PMPublicSeen by 24Hi all,
This is my first post as OpenSSL Cooperation TAC academic delegate, so I would like to briefly introduce myself. My name is Nikolas and I am currently completing my Master's degree at the Technical University of Munich. Starting in June, I will begin an industrial PhD at TUM in collaboration with NVIDIA. This puts me in a unique spot where I am still closely connected to the student perspective while at the same time transitioning into a long-term research role. It is also why I am particularly interested in strengthening the collaboration between academia and the OpenSSL project.
From my perspective, one of our current challenges is that the size of the OpenSSL academic community is still quite limited and as a result our visibility in universities/research institutions is relatively low. If we want to have more academic involvement in the future we need to actively grow this community and improve our outreach.
I would like to use this thread to collect some ideas on how to tackle this.
Some initial ideas to start the discussion:
Regular open hours where students & researchers can join, ask questions, learn how to get involved
Joint events or collaborations with other academic seats/universities (e.g., workshops/guest lectures)
Organizing small hackathons or similar contribution activities
Increasing the visibility for existing academic work/highlight success stories related to OpenSSL (talks, papers, student projects, etc.)
Feel free to use this thread to share any ideas, experiences or suggestions you might have. The goal for now is to collect ideas and in a later step we can look at what is realistic to implement.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Nikolas
Shubham KumarThu 9 Apr 2026 10:43AM
Hi Nicola, thanks for mentioning. I planned to reply later but slipped my mind.
Yes, this is really a great list of potential ideas we can discuss and maybe find some better ones in our discussion. And an initial open hour call would be great for a starter. I am available for any day except for Tuesday and some time slots on Wednesday and Friday. We can decide the timeslot with a poll.
Also, there is Easter season going on in the UK and some parts of Europe, so I am not sure if everyone will be available for this week or next. Let’s just wait for @Billy Brumley and @Nikolas Gauder to follow up, then creating a poll will be good.
Look forward to meeting!!
Nikolas GauderThu 9 Apr 2026 8:20PM
I'm flexible on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Happy to fit around what works best
Milan BrozFri 10 Apr 2026 5:42PM
Hi Nikolas,
These are great ideas.
Maybe just think about a long-term sustainability plan, as meetings like this can sometimes lose momentum after a few iterations.
Regular student presentations might help keep things going.
Please cc me on upcoming meetings, I would like to join, if possible.
Nicola Tuveri ·Thu 9 Apr 2026 9:43AM
This is great Nikolas! I'd support all of these initial suggestions!
Maybe we could kick off an initial “open hours” meeting where at least the four representatives are present. For this first session, we could keep the agenda fairly general—focused on discussing these ideas further and having an open conversation with any community members who join the call.
@Billy Brumley @Shubham Kumar what do you think about it? is it likely we can find a timeslot that fits all 4 of us?