Organization(s)
Welcome to POSE
Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) is a U.S. National Science Foundation program that harnesses the power of distributed open-source development to address challenges of national, societal and economic importance.
The POSE program aims to further the development of open-source products or infrastructure and foster expansion of the community of open-source users and developers to engender long-term project sustainability. It supports the establishment of managing organizations that will create opportunities and provide capabilities for their open-source ecosystems.
POSE program goals are to:
Ensure the efficient transition of open-source products into impactful and sustainable open-source ecosystems.
Ensure that security, privacy, continuous integration and efficient supply chain best practices are built into open-source ecosystems from the outset.
Ensure that open-source ecosystems engage their developer communities in an inclusive, equitable and open manner.
Catalyzing the creation of open-source ecosystems
The POSE program funds managing organizations to catalyze the creation and growth of open-source ecosystems based on an existing mature open-source product.
POSE-funded managing organizations will be responsible for a range of activities, including:
- Building and maintaining a distributed community of external contributors who will actively participate in the ongoing development of the open-source product.
- Building an open-source infrastructure to ensure the safe, secure and reliable delivery of the open-source product to users.
- Understanding the requirements of the end-user ecosystems within which the open-source product will be deployed and ensuring these requirements inform the activities of the developer community.
- Establishing a legal and governance framework for the open-source ecosystem.
- Ensuring long-term sustainability of the open-source ecosystem.
This graphic shows the structure of a typical open-source ecosystem as envisioned under the POSE program. In this ecosystem, a community of developers, shown on the left, makes ongoing contributions to a mature open-source product. These contributions are coordinated by a managing organization, shown in the center, that is charged with ensuring the open-source product is focused on addressing a specific, societally important need and establishing relationships with end-user communities across the research enterprise, industry, and government, shown on the right in this figure. POSE awards fund activities associated with the managing organization.