Today, we announce our plans to expand the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) and outline how you can contribute to COIs and support it in becoming an open, reliable, and community-driven resource.

Background

COIs is designed to help provide more easily accessible, comprehensive, and actionable information for funders, users, and other stakeholders making informed decisions about open infrastructure service providers.

We launched the prototype for COIs in January 2022, which featured 10 open infrastructure services. With the prototype, we solicited feedback from funders, institutional leaders, tool providers, and the broader user community to better understand COIs’s value proposition and areas for improvement.

Improving the scalability of COIs

An area of concern, both for our team and the community, is COIs’s scalability. In building the prototype, our team manually gathered information from publicly available sources, including organisation websites, funder websites, and government taxing authorities. We also conducted research with providers involving a survey and 1-on-1 interviews to collect additional information and gain further insight into this work. As we explore expanding COIs, our intention is to refine the value proposition for funders, providers, and other key stakeholders in order to design a more efficient processes to gather, verify, and display information while keeping existing information up-to-date and expanding the information available to better serve the needs of those using COIs.

To this end:

  1. We are releasing the COIs documentation. This documentation is the primary resource for understanding the background, content, and key frameworks for COIs. We define key terms, describe key inputs, and articulate our internal decision-making on what content we included and how we chose to display it in order to inform and engage users of COIs, as well as support those interested in submitting information on services not already included in COIs.
  2. We are launching an interest survey for open infrastructure service providers who are interested in being added to the next release of COIs. In this short survey, we ask service providers to assess their information on the key areas covered in COIs, and how they would like to submit that information to and maintain it on COIs. We would like to invite a broad range of open infrastructure service providers, e.g. of different sizes, governance models, and geographical areas, to take part in this survey. This would help build a more comprehensive understanding of the diversity of data types and practices, and increase the resilience of COIs, its infrastructure and processes.

Contribute to developing COIs

We can only move COIs and this work forward with the support of open infrastructure services providers. You can help by expressing your interest in being added to the next release of COIs by filling in the Interest survey, by June 20.

We also invite everyone interested to read and comment on the COIs documentation to help improve the value, usability, scalability and overall user experience of COIs.

We are organizing two Q&A sessions on Tuesday, May 17, 2022 to further discuss these plans with the community and answer any questions you may have:

The sessions will be recorded, and the recordings and a short recap will be shared here on our blog. We look forward to meeting you at one of the sessions!

If you have any further questions and feedback about COIs and these plans, please email catalog@investinopen.org. We would love to hear from you.

Social media card image by Wallusy on Pixabay.

Posted by Emmy Tsang