2024 Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund

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. 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

We ́re also soliciting the implementation of (small-scale) prototypes like frameworks, policy work or strategic communications that help achieve more sustainable practices in the communities providing and deploying ODI components.