We are thrilled to announce that we have received a grant from the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund (Cohort #4) to embark on a research project examining community health frameworks and their applicability and usefulness in incentivizing investment in and adoption of open infrastructure for research. This work represents an important opportunity to deepen our shared understanding of how open infrastructure supports the research community and contributes to advancing knowledge globally, and how community health frameworks can help align stakeholders in the open infrastructure community in their investment.

Open infrastructure plays a vital role in enabling equitable access to and participation in research and scholarship, yet its unique values often go unrecognized. Open infrastructure and their advocates have been developing and using various community health assessment frameworks, including the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication, the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS), Community Smells, and others. These frameworks are often co-developed by and with developers and maintainers of infrastructures, and the co-development processes offer opportunities for the infrastructures to come together, discuss, and converge on how to best advance values of openness, transparency, inclusivity, and long-term sustainability in their work. Infrastructures have self-assessed against these frameworks to understand areas of opportunity to ensure that they operate in line with these values and improve their sustainability. 

Based on our engagement with investors and funders of open infrastructure, we know that many are keen to identify value-aligned infrastructures to support, and they are actively looking for frameworks to help them assess and validate their choices. Through this research, we hope to identify common health measures or methods that can help align stakeholders — funders, adopters, open infrastructure service providers, and others — in their investments in advancing the health and resilience of the open infrastructure ecosystem. 

What we’ll be doing

Over the course of 2025, we will be:

• Conducting interviews and surveys with open infrastructure funders and adopters, and open-source community members across public, corporate, and non-profit sectors to understand what adds up to open infrastructure community success. 
• Examining existing community health frameworks to identify health measures/methods that are most applicable and useful, based on the interview results
• Establishing reporting mechanisms for the selected health measures, and testing the mechanisms using the existing Infra Finder dataset.

Why this matters

This project is driven by our commitment to supporting the development of a healthy, resilient ecosystem of open infrastructure for research and scholarship. By working with diverse stakeholders within the open infrastructure landscape to examine and co-develop community health measures, we aim to align and coordinate stakeholders in driving more informed, strategic, and coordinated investments in and adoption of open infrastructure.

Join us in this work

As we progress, we’ll share updates, findings, and opportunities to get involved. Whether you’re an open infrastructure maintainer or contributor, a user/adopter of open-source software, or a funder interested in this space, your voice matters. Please contact research [at] investinopen [dot] org if you have any questions about this work.

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