About the D//F & RFP #4
The Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, established in 2018, is a global multi-funder initiative supported by Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network and Schmidt Futures.
The funders circle sustains a platform for academics and practitioners to better understand how open digital infrastructure is built and deployed.
Through open calls and commissions, D//F curates a body of research and implementation insights that advance our mutual goal to ensure a public commons of technology, for the benefit of everyone.
By fostering collaboration, experiments and sharing of knowledge we support those who build, use, and rely on critical open source projects.
Without a deeper understanding of the dynamics influencing and more just ways of maintaining our shared digital resources as joint effort across foundations, governments, businesses, academia and volunteer communities, inequities will follow.
Safeguarding sustainable, open digital infrastructure is a matter of public interest.
These could manifest as the consolidation of essential services within monopolies or the potential loss of access to knowledge and (digital) means of production.
Our approach is interdisciplinary:
- we aim to back the development of pertinent work that examines the convergence of open digital infrastructure with social movements focused on democracy, rights, justice, the environment and the advancement of knowledge in academia and beyond.
Examples of Past Work:
In 2018, 2020 and 2023 the partnership published three open RFPs that resulted in groundbreaking research and hands-on experiments to better understand the incentives and constraints that influence the creation and maintenance of open digital infrastructure as well as its use throughout science and research, administrations or the economy.
The current project portfolio and exemplary research questions can be accessed here: https://infrastructureinsights.fund/#projects.
sustainable practices in the communities providing and deploying ODI components.
Our approach is interdisciplinary:
- we are looking for analyses on how open digital infrastructure interacts and intersects with politics & sovereign responsibilities, diverse economic sectors, and scientific research through all disciplines.
- we seek to investigate the issue of under-maintenance and undermining of infrastructural FOSS, as well as explore any geographical or other disparities within the communities responsible for providing and sustaining these software components amid evolving economic, regulatory and socio-technical circumstances.
- we seek to investigate the issue of under-maintenance and undermining of infrastructural FOSS, as well as explore any geographical or other disparities within the communities responsible for providing and sustaining these software components amid evolving economic, regulatory and socio-technical circumstances.
- we aim to back the development of pertinent work that examines the convergence of open digital infrastructure with social movements focused on democracy, rights, justice, the environment and the advancement of knowledge in academia and beyond.
Examples of Past Work:
In 2018, 2020 and 2023 the partnership published three open RFPs that resulted in groundbreaking research and hands-on experiments to better understand the incentives and constraints that influence the creation and maintenance of open digital infrastructure as well as its use throughout science and research, administrations or the economy.
The current project portfolio and exemplary research questions can be accessed here: https://infrastructureinsights.fund/#projects.
RFP #4 & Scope
To further pursue D//Fs agenda, the 2024 RFP invites new research proposals to study the rationales, production, use, governance and maintenance of open digital infrastructures.
These investigations could be looking at, but are not limited to, the aspects listed below in the scope of the fund:
Open Digital Infrastructure as Digital Commons
Open Digital Infrastructure (ODI) represents the set of Open Source code, institutional settings (f.i. technical standards) as well as knowledge assets that building block- technologies (like software libraries, compilers, or communication- and network protocols) are composed of. They are created by individuals, in volunteer communities, in research institutions and SMEs or other corporate environments. Together, they form a foundation of free and public code that is designed to solve common challenges- firstly, in programming, but when applied, also to provide a multitude of (digital) core functions for society.ODI is a distinct area of focus sitting in intersection with other critical technology ecosystems like hardware, the internet and data, has personal (needs-related), social (functions), economic (business activities), and cultural- political components. It hence can be classified as a genuine common and pertains to us all (see Eghbal, Roads and Bridges 2016):
Everything in our modern society, from social services and hospitals to banks and collaborative research depends on it. Open Digital Infrastructure provides essential functions for society by f.i. reducing the cost of establishing new businesses, supporting data-driven discovery across research disciplines, and granting access to crucial technical innovations like encryption that would otherwise be too expensive.
In recent reports, it has been approximated that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) building blocks make up 70-90% of all software solutions globally - and have long become a crucial asset encompassing both public and private sectors.
100% of this digital infrastructure relies on humans behind the code, supplying it and tending for it. Their labor is knowledge- and time intense: substrates that don‘t reciprocally scale with the programs they produce.
Critical software projects at the core of our modern world thus are often under-resourced and their (volunteer) maintainers overworked and overlooked.
Critical software projects at the core of our modern world thus are often under-resourced and their (volunteer) maintainers overworked and overlooked.
More insights are needed to distinguish how Open Digital Infrastructure and its creators can be supported best.
There is a growing need for specialized and updated knowledge about the production, governance, sustainability and security of FOSS - Infrastructure from different actors, as reliance upon those digital components also grows.
We are generally interested in these core areas of research - but are looking forward to read your individual take on our scope:
- Boundaries of Openness: Normative & Ideological Foundations, political economies, legal loopholes & other challenges in FOSS (Infrastructure)
- ODI as accelerator: Role & adoption in Knowledge Dissemination and Innovation from Basic Research to Field Work in academia, factories and beyond
- Building “Cyber Resilience” from Weekend Projects to Critical Infrastructures: DevOps, Consolidation, Regulation, (sociotechnical construction of) supply chains
- Group- and Power- Dynamics impacting the development of communities, artifacts, and policy in FOSS
- ODI and its intersections with materiality, technical standards, hardware, coding practices, automation and AI, data pipelines, connectivity ...
- Geopolitics, Policy Frameworks, Markets, Law: landscapes shaping the trajectory and long-term sustainability of ODI
- The Human Infrastructure in Digital Infrastructure: Global Shifts, Demographics and other opportunities (or impediments) of building and maintaining software and communities
- Social, Material, Environmental, Temporal (...) Dimensions of Sustainability (including observations on practices of Sustenance & Sunsetting in infrastructural FOSS-Software Lifecycles)
- History & Ontologies: Learning from Public Works and other (historic) infrastructure for the custody and care of ODI, bridging and discussing paradigms from open innovation to digital public goods
- Models & Metrics: Defining and demonstrating Health, Risk, Security and more
sustainable practices in the communities providing and deploying ODI components.
Key Facts
- Due Date Proposals: June 2nd 2024
- Selection of successful projects completed: in late July 2024 (tbc.). A board of external experts helps us identify the most relevant research questions.
- Research period must start: Between mid-August ´24 and October´24 (tbc.) (Kickoff Workshop for Grantees planned in second week of October).
- Grant Amount, Number of Grants & Disbursement: We seek to support proposals addressing a range of issues and different scopes in a range between $50k – $100k for 6 - 12 months projects (exceptions in duration possible for up to 14 month-proposals). Grants will be disbursed against milestone achievements. We expect to select a total number of 7- 10 projects for the Cohort #4. The individual size of the grant will be negotiated post-selection.
- Further Opportunities:
For more information about the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund and its initiatives, please visit https://infrastructureinsights.fund.
To stay updated about all D//F activities, subscribe to our Newsletter: https://opencollective.us12.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=88fc8f0f3b646152f1cfe447a&id=f3df65ec27
Eligibility Criteria
- Individuals, Organizations (nonprofit and for-profit) as well as Academic Institutions are eligible.
- Individuals and Organizations based outside of the United States and Europe are especially encouraged to apply.
- For more information and sending your proposals, visit the Digital Infrastructure Insights Research - Application Platform
Tips
- Make sure to read the RFP thoroughly and familiarise yourself with prior grant projects to ensure to meet the scope, but not to replicate.
- Be specific in your research questions - and specify the open foundational technologies, systems or maintainers your project centers, too (keep in mind: Infrastructure≠Software application)
- To be able to fund implementation experiments, we need to know which prior findings you base your idea on, and/or which communities you‘ll work with to make ODI more sustainable.
- Definitions vary: If your proposal approaches open digital infrastructure, communities & the public interest ( f.i. consolidation, openness, sustainability, disparities) transcending our definitions, put your lens in context to our scope and explain.
- No technology fund: We don‘t fund software development in itself- unless it enhances a specific research questions related to our scope and serves a scientific purpose in this context.