POSE: Phase II: Building an Open-Source Ecosystem Around the Gen3 Data Commons Software Platform

Gen3 is an open-source software platform that enables researchers to manage, analyze, and share large-scale scientific data, which are critical hurdles that often slow scientific advances. Gen3 manages petabytes of data that includes millions of data objects that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable for scientific research and education.

While Gen3 has historically been used by larger organizations that have experience with setting up and operating large-scale cloud computing applications, this project expands the reach of Gen3 to bring these same powerful data sharing and analytical solutions to smaller research organizations, so that they can obtain the product's benefits with respect to scientific advancement and reproducibility. With funding from the Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, the project establishes a mature and capable open-source ecosystem around Gen3.

The project enables distributed improvements to the code base from the community, the creation of new scientific use cases, and a governance structure that makes the Gen3 development roadmap responsive to community needs.

This project strengthens the communities of users and developers around this open-source data sharing and analysis platform. The project focuses on making the product easier to set up and maintain, prioritizing features needed by the research community. This effort makes the product available more widely to research and educational communities, including those organizations with limited technical and/or monetary resources.

To accomplish these goals, the project 1) improves documentation including a new site and additional content, 2) creates new working groups and hackathons focused on particular topics, 3) creates a technical steering committee for Gen3, and 4) expands direct user support for timely response to questions and code contributions from the open-source community.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.