Scholarship is at its best when communities of researchers, learners, and scholars can share, discover, and collaborate. Open and community-governed infrastructure - systems, protocols, and software that research and scholarship rely on - plays an important role in enabling equitable participation in and access to knowledge, thereby in fostering a more inclusive and vibrant research and knowledge ecosystem.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) was founded with the belief that in order for open infrastructure to flourish, we need to advance our collective understanding and strategy for sustaining its use and adoption in institutional settings. To ensure that the resources and strategies we are building are relevant and representative, we embarked on a journey to critically examine and evolve our governance structure and membership. This included examining deeply what voices we invite in, whose needs are represented, who we are designing solutions for, and what strategies and thinking we seek to learn from from adjacent sectors, from digital rights to network infrastructure, to apply to our work at IOI.
This process began with our collaboration with our inaugural Steering Committee in examining whether the original Steering Committee structure best suited our future plans for growth, learning, and sustainability. Beginning in July 2020, IOI and Code for Science and Society (CS&S) jointly commissioned inclusion experts DeEtta Jones & Associates (DJA) to help us build towards an anti-racist and more inclusive governance model, including a nomination and review process and onboarding resources. An open call for nominations for IOI’s Steering Committee followed.
Today, we are excited to welcome eight new members to IOI’s Steering Committee, our main governing body, to join us in working to sustain effective digital infrastructure needed for open knowledge to flourish. The IOI Steering Committee brings new ideas, strategies, and learnings to the work of IOI from adjacent communities and areas of infrastructure.
The new members are joined by three members of the previous Steering Committee - Danielle Robinson, Leslie Chan, and Evviva Weinraub Lajoie.
Please join us in welcoming the new Steering Committee to our work to advance open infrastructure investment and adoption. (Biographies can be found here.)
- Amy Buckland, Library and Archives Canada
- Mmaki Jantjies, Telkom SA; University of the Western Cape
- Omo Oaiya, WACREN
- Danil Mikhailov, data.org
- Lorrayne Porciuncula, Datasphere Initiative
- Berhan Taye, Internews
- Amy Sample Ward, NTEN
- Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough; Knowledge Equity Lab
- Evviva Weinraub Lajoie, State University of New York at Buffalo
- Jochai Ben-Avie, Connect Humanity*
- Danielle Robinson, Code for Science & Society*
*Denotes non-voting advisors.
Our sincere thanks to the IOI’s inaugural founding members. Without their counsel, support, and dedication, IOI would simply not exist today.
- Virginia Barbour, Open Access Australasia
- Arianna Becerril, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Redalyc, AmeliCA
- Raym Crow, SPARC US
- Heather Joseph, SPARC US
- David Lewis, Indiana University, 2.5% Commitment
- Pierre Mounier, Open Edition, OPERAS
- Cameron Neylon, Curtin University
- Lucy Ofiesh, Crossref
- Nici Pfeiffer, Center for Open Science
- Vanessa Proudman, SPARC Europe
- Kristen Ratan, Strategies for Open Science (Stratos)
- Mike Roy, Middlebury College
- Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute
- Greg Tananbaum, Open Research Funders Group
- Dan Whaley, Hypothesis
- Maurice York, Big Ten Academic Alliance
- Ina Smith, Academy of Science of South Africa
- Peg Fowler, Hypothesis
We will be sharing more about our process to evolve IOI’s governance and learnings in upcoming posts, from our work with DeEtta Jones & Associates to the work of our inaugural Governance & Nominating Committee, public call for nominations, and recruitment efforts. Sign up for our mailing list, or get in touch!