Certification Working Group

The Certification Working Group (CWG) develops and administers programs to certify model code that meets OMF standards for modeling best practices, and officially recognize model developers who apply these standards. CWG activities include developing and administering a community-wide program for model code peer review, establishing metrics for standards compliance, creating and assigning digital certification badges that follow guidelines being developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). The CWG helps OMF member (and other) code repositories to ensure that models meeting OMF standards are clearly identified and developers who create standards-based models are publicly recognized. The CWG coordinates collaborative efforts with journals, funding agencies, societies, institutions/labs, other software/modeling consortia, and professional bodies to disseminate and administer OMF standards across the community of modeling science, and to promote recognition of OMF standards.

If you are interested in joining the Certification Working Group, please use this link or reach out to any of the group Co-Chairs for further information.

Contribute to the Certification Working Group discussion on GitHub

Certification Co-Chairs

Christopher Erdmann

• Has previously worked for and with many organizations, including; the American Geophysical Union, Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC, California Digital Library (The Carpentries), Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, European Southern Observatory, and the United Nations
• Is a community advocate, developer, and experimenter in the areas of Open Science and FAIR

Sandra Gesing

• Holds dual roles as Executive Director of the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) and as a Senior Researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, focusing on science gateways, computational workflows, and distributed computing in interdisciplinary contexts
• Directs the Center of Excellence for Science Gateways
• Performs advocacy work through US-RSE to promote career paths and recognition for research software engineers
• Has held academic and industry positions in the US, UK, and Germany

Ismael Kherroubi Garcia

• Founder and CEO of Kairoi, the AI ethics and research governance consultancy
• Founder and co-lead of the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN) at the RSA
• He holds both a bachelor’s in business administration and management, and a master’s in philosophy of the social sciences

Current Developments

The nearly 30 members of the Certification WG are taking a short break from projects after the monumental efforts put into their recent manuscript. New projects and directions will be discussed in the first quarter of 2025.

Previous Projects

• Manuscript preparation ‘Ten Simple Rules to Promote Good Model-Sharing Practices’. Preprint available through Zenodo.
• Feb-May 2024: Seven part ModelShare workshop series. Learn more about this project here.