Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)

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 broader and more diverse 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 an existing 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. Whereas programs like the NSF Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps™) and America’s Seed Fund [Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR)] represent an integrated set of programs to provide researchers with the capacity to transform their fundamental research into deep technology ventures, POSE is specifically focused on another translational pathway – supporting the transition from open-source research artifacts to OSEs.

Importantly, the POSE program is not intended to fund the development of open-source products, including tools and artifacts. The POSE program is also not intended to fund existing well-resourced, open-source communities or ecosystems. Instead, the program aims to support new managing organizations to catalyze distributed, community-driven development and growth of new OSEs. The expected outcomes of the POSE program are to grow the community of researchers and innovators who develop and contribute to OSE efforts, and to enable pathways for the safe and secure development of OSEs that have broad societal impacts. OSEs can emerge from any areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) research and development.

This solicitation seeks two types of proposals, allowing teams to propose specific activities to scope and plan the establishment of an OSE (Phase I), and to establish a sustainable OSE based on a robust open-source product that shows promise in the ability to both meet an emergent societal or national need and build a community to help develop it (Phase II).

Phase I: OSE Scoping and Planning Proposals

Phase I projects are for open-source research products with a small community of external users though the product may not necessarily have external content developers. The objectives of Phase I projects are to: (1) enable scoping activities that will inform the transition of promising research products that are already available in open-source formats into sustainable and robust OSEs that will have broad societal impacts, and (2) provide training to teams interested in building such an OSE.

Phase I awardees are not obligated to submit Phase II proposals in the future. 

Phase II: Establishment and Expansion Proposals

Phase II projects are for open-source research products with small, existing communities of external users and external content developers. The objective of Phase II projects is to support the transition of a promising open-source product into a sustainable and robust OSE. Phase II proposal teams are expected to have already conducted the scoping activities needed to develop a detailed project plan to support the community-driven distributed development and deployment of successful open-source tools into operational environments (not necessarily via a Phase I award). 

An NSF POSE Phase I award is not required for the submission of a Phase II proposal.