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

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.