A decade of RAPID—Reflections on the development of an open source geoscience code

Earth science increasingly relies on computer‐based methods and many government agencies now require further sharing of the digital products they helped fund. Earth scientists, while often supportive of more transparency in the methods they develop, are concerned by this recent requirement and puzzled by its multiple implications. This paper therefore presents a reflection on the numerous aspects of sharing code and data in the general field of computer modeling of dynamic Earth processes. Our reflection is based on 10 years of development of an open source model called the Routing Application for Parallel Computation of Discharge (RAPID) that simulates the propagation of water flow waves in river networks. Three consecutive but distinct phases of the sharing process are highlighted here: opening, exposing, and consolidating. Each one of these phases is presented as an independent and tractable increment aligned with the various stages of code development and justified based on the size of the users community. Several aspects of digital scholarship are presented here including licenses, documentation, websites, citable code and data repositories, and testing. While the many existing services facilitate the sharing of digital research products, digital scholarship also raises community challenges related to technical training, self‐perceived inadequacy, community contribution, acknowledgment and performance assessment, and sustainable sharing.