POSE: Phase II: Cultivating Modeling Literacy and Practice through a NetLogo Open Source Ecosystem

该项目由开放源代码生态系统之路（POSE）资助，旨在利用开放源代码开发的力量，为国家和社会重要问题创造新技术解决方案。基于计算主体的建模是自然科学和社会科学中广泛使用的工具。基于代理的模型通过将复杂系统各部分的行为建模为许多相互作用的计算代理或实体来捕获复杂系统的属性。由于其可及性和解释力，基于主体的建模已成为研究广泛现象的核心方法，包括生物生态系统、分子和化学相互作用、经济系统和传染病传播。在过去的二十年中，西北大学的NetLogo团队开发了一个大型的开源代码库，由NetLogo基于代理的建模（ABM）环境和许多相关产品组成。NetLogo已成为领先的ABM平台，拥有数十万用户，包括研究人员和K-16教育工作者。自然科学、社会科学和政策领域的研究人员使用NetLogo发表了数千篇科学文章。教育工作者利用NetLogo通过基于探究的建模活动来吸引学生学习复杂系统。该项目将把NetLogo现有的开源产品家族转变为一个可持续的开源生态系统（OSE），该生态系统支持建模社区创建和重新混合公开可用的模型，并为建模工具本身做出贡献。许多人自愿贡献软件扩展、科学模型、课程单元、教科书、翻译和文档，以及NetLogo的核心代码。为了确保NetLogo的未来并实现持久的社会影响，需要超越当前以单一学术实验室为中心的NetLogo开发模式。该项目将创建并执行建立管理组织的计划，以发展OSE，包括组织结构和治理，社区外展，社区贡献工具和流程以及财务可持续性的计划。OSE管理组织将维护和创建各种NetLogo社区需要的基础设施和过程，以维持和增加他们对NetLogo建模的参与，并确保他们的持续存在。研究人员、政策制定者、教师和学生将受益于经过审查的模型、创建模型的工具，以及一个在可持续生态系统中分享和讨论模型的社区。从长期来看，该项目的影响将包括增加在研究、政策和教育方面的建模实践，支持一个具有建模素养的社会更好地为解决人类的复杂问题做好准备。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Computational agent-based modeling is a widely used tool in the natural and social sciences. Agent-based models capture the properties of a complex system by modeling the behavior of its parts as many interacting computational agents or entities. Due to its accessibility and explanatory power, agent-based modeling has become a central methodology for investigating a wide range of phenomena including biological ecosystems, molecular and chemical interactions, economic systems, and spread of contagious disease. Over the past two decades, the NetLogo team at Northwestern University has developed a large open-source codebase consisting of the NetLogo agent-based modeling (ABM) environment and many associated products. NetLogo has become the leading ABM platform, with hundreds of thousands of users including both researchers and K-16 educators. Researchers in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy have published thousands of scientific articles using NetLogo. Educators use NetLogo to engage students in learning about complex systems through inquiry-based modeling activities. This project will transform the existing open-source product family of NetLogo into a sustainable open-source ecosystem (OSE) that supports a modeling community to both create and remix publicly available models and contribute to the modeling tools themselves. Many individuals have volunteered to contribute software extensions, scientific models, curricular units, textbooks, translations and documentation, as well as to the core NetLogo code. To ensure NetLogo’s future and to achieve lasting societal impact will require expanding beyond the current mode of NetLogo development centered around a single academic lab. This project will create and pursue plans for establishing a managing organization to grow the OSE, including plans for organizational structure and governance, community outreach, community contribution tools and processes, and financial sustainability. The OSE managing organization will maintain and create the infrastructure and processes that the varied NetLogo communities need to sustain and grow their involvement in NetLogo modeling, and assures them of its continued existence. Researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students will benefit from vetted models, tools for creating models, and a community to share and discuss models in a sustainable ecosystem. In the longer-term, the project’s impacts will include increasing modeling practice in research, policy and education, supporting a modeling-literate society better prepared to solve humanity’s complex problems.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.