Open@RIT's POSE Analysis: High-Level review of the 2023 NSF POSE Awards and Recommendations for Enhancing the Solicitation

Introduction:

Open@RIT, RIT’s Open Programs Office, has analyzed the Phase I and Phase II abstracts from the 2023 awards from the NSF Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) as a service to our campus and the greater Open Work community at large. It is our hope that this will help potential applicants for the coming year’s solicitation have a better understanding of the program and its alignment with their own efforts overall.

The following breakdown has three general points of discussion:

1. The research domains in which the funded project exists, such as physical sciences, computing, etc.

2. The specific Open Source Product at the heart of the proposed ecosystem.

3. The types of work/outcomes the funds will be used to achieve.

Limitations of the analysis:

The NSF provides only proposal abstracts of awarded projects for public consumption. These provide fairly  limited information for analysis. Abstracts don’t follow a specific format, so their structure and the level of detail they provide vary widely. 

The terminology used from one abstract to another also varies. For example, the word “infrastructure” could refer to human, physical, or digital infrastructure, and how the term is being used in a given abstract may not be clear. Another example is “platform,” which could reference both a software-development platform or a community-building platform. Both uses of the term could appear either as an existing Open Source Product (OSP) or as a desired outcome of an Open Source Ecosystem (OSE,) which NSF funding would be used to accomplish. Other terms follow a similar pattern throughout the abstracts.