Due: January 13, 2025
The Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program aims to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Many NSF-funded projects result in publicly accessible, modifiable, and distributable open-source products, including software, hardware, models, specifications, programming languages, or data platforms that catalyze further innovation. In some cases, an open-source product that shows potential for wide adoption forms the basis for a self-sustaining open-source ecosystem (OSE) that comprises a leadership team; a managing organization with a well-defined governance structure and distributed development model; a cohesive community of external intellectual content developers; and a broad base of users across academia, industry, and/or government. The overarching vision of POSE is that proactive and intentional formation of managing organizations will ensure adoption of open-source products; increased coordination of external intellectual content developer contributions; and a more focused route to technologies with broad societal impact. Toward this end, the POSE program supports the formation of new OSE managing organizations based on anexisting open-source product or class of products, whereby each organization is responsible for the creation and management of processes and infrastructure needed for the efficient and secure development and maintenance of an OSE. POSE constitutes a new pathway to translate scientific innovations, akin to the Lab-to-Market Platform that NSF has pioneered over many decades.