POSE: Phase II: Establishing an Open-Source Ecosystem for Tethys Platform

Aquaveo, Llc, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

Tethys Platform is a web framework that facilitates the development, deployment, and hosting of communication tools that help scientists, engineers, decision makers, first responders, and the general public engage with scientific data in a meaningful way. The vision of a Tethys Platform OSE is to enable scientists to better communicate the latest science and thereby enable outcomes like more informed response in the face of a natural disaster, better policies for sustaining our environment, better management of Earth’s resources, and increased public literacy and understanding of the complex processes and interactions at play in the natural environment. Already, the seeds for a global OSE have been sown by various organizations around the world that rely on the use of Tethys Platform. Many of the tools developed by these organizations using Tethys Platform are acting as a global leveler, providing access to science and data from premier organizations to other organizations in countries where there is a dearth of such scientific research and data. The communication channel created by these tools often leads to subsequent collaborations between the participating organizations. An example of the impact of these collaborations is the resulting knowledge transfer between the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Eastern Africa and The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal, which led to the development of a flood early warning system in Malawi that was formed around tools developed with Tethys Platform and helped to minimize the impact of flooding that occurred due to Cyclone Ana in early 2022. This project seeks to maximize this type of results by cultivating and growing the Tethys Platform community, fostering an inclusive, diverse OSE community, and providing learning and growth opportunities in STEM. The work that will be carried out in this POSE project is organized into four high level activities: Form a Managing Organization, Build the User Community, Build the Contributor Base, and Improve the Tethys Platform Distribution. The first activity will involve establishing a non-profit managing organization for the Tethys Platform OSE, codenamed Tethys Software Foundation (TSF). The mission of the TSF will be to promote better communication of the geosciences through the use and advancement of Tethys Platform, facilitate contribution to the Tethys Platform codebase, maintain stewardship of the intellectual property and trademarks of Tethys Platform on behalf of the community, and grow the already diverse international community of Tethys app developers and celebrate their work. The second activity will be focused on growing the user community and expanding it to include scientists in more geoscience disciplines. This will be done through a number of discovery and promotion activities including establishing domain working groups to identify development and other needs specific to each discipline, promoting Tethys Platform at conferences, improving educational curriculum, and holding regular Tethys user conferences. The third activity will involve growing the contributor base. This activity will encourage more Tethys app developers to become contributors to the platform in a pay-it-forward fashion and develop contributor training resources with a formal onboarding process for would-be contributors. The fourth activity will focus on improving quality control, security, and privacy aspects of the Tethys Platform distribution. Examples of specific tasks that will be undertaken include expanding test code coverage and ensuring testing is performed on all major platforms; implementing security scanning of the repository, dependencies, and artifacts; addressing data privacy issues; and establishing formal mechanisms for giving credit to the external intellectual content and data contributors. Website: http://www.tethysplatform.org/ Source Code: https://github.com/tethysplatform/tethys Documentation: http://docs.tethysplatform.org/en/stable/ 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.