  Microscopes have morphed from purely optical instruments into motorized,
robotic machines that form images on digital sensors rather than eyeballs. This
continuing trend towards automation and digitization enables many new
approaches to microscopy that would have been impossible or impractical without
computer interfaces. Accordingly, todays development of new microscopes most
often depends on concurrent software development to bring these custom-build
systems to life. This dependence on software brings opportunities and
challenges. Most importantly, a key challenge while developing new microscopes
is to develop the appropriate software. Despite the fact that software is
easily copied and distributed, remarkably few opportunities are available to
share experiences creating microscope control software. In turn, this brings
challenges in creating maintainable and flexible software code and writing User
Interfaces (UIs) that are easily used by researchers, who are primarily life
scientists. To start to address these challenges by identifying common problems
and shared solutions, we assembled a small group of researchers that develop or
use software to control their custom-build microscopes at the Janelia Research
Campus for a two-day workshop in February 2020. The outcome of the workshop was
the definition of clear milestones, as well as the recognition of an involved
community, much larger than the one assembled at the workshop. This community
encounters similar hurdles and shares a great desire to overcome these by
stronger, community-wide collaborations on Open Source Software. This White
Paper summarizes the major issues identified, proposes approaches to address
these as a community, and outlines the next steps that can be taken to develop
a framework facilitating shared microscope software development, significantly
speeding up development of new microscopy systems.
