[Bioperl-l] NSF Funding opportunity for open source ecosystems

[David Mertens]

Hello PDL, BioPerl, The Quantified Onion, and Perl Foundation folks,

The NSF just sent out an interesting program announcement:
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22572/nsf22572.htm, Pathways to Enable
Open-Source Ecosystems (PEOSE)

The PEOSE program aims to support managing organizations that will
> facilitate the creation and growth of sustainable high-impact open-source
> ecosystems (OSEs ) around already-developed open-source research products.
>

As is clarified in the description of the Phase II projects (which can get
up to $1.5 million over two years), the aim of this announcement is to
"support the transition of a promising open-source research product into a
sustainable and robust OSE." Proposals need to "identif[y] an intended user
community or organizations that will serve as *early adopters of the
technology*." Both PDL and BioPerl have made the transition to ecosystems
and are certainly not technologies in search of early adopters. No, this is
for anybody who has a "research product" that they envision could be
vaulted into its own Open Source Ecosystem.

That said, perhaps a larger governance organization could be envisioned
under which PDL, BioPerl, and perhaps other scientific projects could be
governed. I am sure that any Perl proposals would be greatly enhanced if
they could leverage the existing communities, organizations, and resources.
What follows are some ideas I came up with that may be helpful.

Part of the proposal would have to focus on outreach to researchers. Here
are some ways to do that which I think would really grab people's attention:

   - Provide free pre- or post-conference workshops. If you have a
   "research product" then you would give a workshop on how to use it, but you
   would probably also want to discuss the pipeline from research product to
   open-source ecosystem, i.e. how to take a Perl script and turn it into a
   module, and then how to publish that module on CPAN. We have amazing Perl
   speakers who I'm sure would be happy to cover this for a fee that would
   come from this proposal's budget. I know the APS March Meeting has these
   kinds of workshops and I am sure bio and astro conferences do as well.
   - Provide a cash award ($1k? $2k?) at select conferences for "best use
   of Perl/my-project in scientific research." I'm sure this would get grad
   students' attention and give them a reason to talk about using Perl in
   their research.

Another aspect to improving the Perl scientific pipeline would be smoothing
the Perl module distribution system for scientific uptake. I would love to
see a MathJax-capable CPAN so I could put equations in my POD, for example.

Hope this is helpful to somebody!
David

P.S. For anybody who is curious about *my* participation in this, I
recently (August) stepped away from academia so I wouldn't be in a position
to submit a proposal. I might be able to work as a part-time *postdoc* for
such a project, but not as a PI. I wouldn't even be able to "ghost-write"
anything because my life is going to be quite busy over the next few months.

-- 
 "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
  by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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