In a different topic we had a question from @tmcgilchrist about what exactly we proposed to the NSF POSE program. This is a fair question!
First, I’d like to give a little bit of context on the program:
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it’s relatively new for the NSF, it’s their attempt at addressing the importance of open source software and the difficulties in funding work on open source ecosystems. This is great!
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we’ve proposed, but we may not get it. I am cautiously optimistic, but ultimately it’s out of our hands.
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The money cannot be used for new features. This is a big part of what makes this different to other NSF funding vehicles, which tend to be for novel research.
So with this context, what’s the tl;dr on what we proposed? The focus in our proposal was on sustainability. This includes:
- funds for more robust infrastructure (think hackage, stackage, hoogle, etc.)
- Projects to help build better “on ramps” for new contributors
- Funding for a release coordinator that will help ensure the quality, consistency, and cross compatibility between all of our core tools
- funding to host more Haskell events globally
- funding for documentation efforts on core tools and libraries.
We don’t know exactly when we’ll hear back from the NSF, except that they expect it to be “early 2025” (if you’ve worked with the NSF you know that ‘early’ can very vague). Rest assured, we’ll let you know when we hear back!
for a successful application.