We are excited to announce that Invest in Open Infrastructure, a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science and Society, has been awarded a grant of $135,125 USD from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the costs and current funding patterns of open infrastructure. The grant will enable us to hire our first Research Data Analyst, building our capacity to investigate the underlying costs associated with open infrastructure projects and the current funding landscape.
This work will build on our efforts from this past fall to analyze philanthropic funding data in the sector, a dataset that pulls publicly available funding data together to examine for funding concentrations, gaps, and other trends.
In addition, this role will also lead research and analysis on the costs associated with leading open infrastructure projects through a series of focused use cases.
Problems we seek to solve
IOI’s work is centered around providing targeted, evidence-based guidance and support to institutions and funders of open infrastructure to help them become wiser about where to invest.
We firmly believe that to increase investment into open infrastructure to make it a competitive and reliable choice for institutions that we need to better understand the underlying costs and economics.
Data on current investment in the sector — from external funders and those within the academy — is at best disaggregated, and at worse incomplete. This work will build on our research over the past year to investigate available funding data as well as do a deep dive on a series of open infrastructure providers to better understand their underlying costs and challenges.
This work will complement the work of our colleagues at Unsub, SPARC (especially their Big Deal tracker), and the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative — organizations who are building out data sources and analysis tools anchored in helping institutional leaders make more informed decisions. We will employ a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, working with stakeholders to map what’s both known and unreported, and exploring ways to address gaps in our understanding of underlying costs.
Want to get involved? Visit our Jobs page to read more about the position and click here to apply.