In June 2021, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) shared a Strategic Plan for 2021–24. This plan describes how we see our path towards a future where open digital infrastructure is robust, easily adoptable, and readily available globally. It lays out five key goals and objectives for our work ahead in conducting research to provide strategic support and investment guidance to those looking to adopt, build, and sustain open infrastructure, and in putting that work into action through convenings, pilots, and global coordination.
As new members of governance and staff joined us at the beginning of 2022, we realized the need for additional clarity – to map at a finer level of detail how the goals in our Strategic Plan manifest as focus areas in our everyday work, and to support both the team in prioritization and planning on a day-to-day basis and also governance members in engaging with our work.
We have also been thinking deeply about our role, aspiration, and theory of change. Working with our governance and key stakeholders to craft a shared roadmap forward, we recognize the importance of building a mechanism to publicly share our work in progress, plans, and ideas to more clearly signal our intentions and aspirations. Such a mechanism would facilitate early feedback and conversations, further meaningful collaborations, and enable more effective coordination of efforts in the broader space.
Additionally, we see value in clearly communicating our goals and aspirations to the broader community as a means to be more fully transparent and accountable to those also interested and engaged with this work.
Today, we share two roadmaps as living, breathing documents:
- Our Strategic Roadmap for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2022-23 builds off our 2021-2024 Strategic Plan. This roadmap seeks to actualize the Strategic Plan with a set of desired outcomes for the five goals laid out in the Strategic Plan, helping bring the strategic planning work of IOI down from the broad goals and closer to the day-to-day work of the organization. This Strategic Roadmap is intended to be both practical and aspirational, defining both a destination and a rough outline of how we plan to get there. As with any map, this exists to guide our staff and partners as well as inform our stakeholders and the broader community of those invested in building a vital ecosystem of open science and scholarly communication practices, tools, and services with both where we are and where we’re going.
- Our Research Roadmap brings our strategy even closer to the day-to-day work of IOI by linking the elements in the Strategic Roadmap to key research questions. We also track status (in development, being scoped, etc) and related deliverables, linking both to the tangible research outputs of IOI as well as to the Strategic Roadmap and the Strategic Plan. This is intended to outline our research objectives and key activities on a quarterly basis.
These roadmaps are working documents we are continuously updating as we shape the work of IOI, integrating our learning, adapting our resources, and responding to the dynamic conditions in this evolving area of study. We’re sharing them in order to to signal our intent, be transparent about our thinking and strategic direction, and keep ourselves accountable. As working documents, they are by necessity incomplete, but we hope this will be one of many ways we can engage the larger community interested and engaged with this important work.
We welcome your feedback on the two boards. What additional information would you like to see? Where can we provide more clarity or detail? Please add comments to cards on the boards with constructive thoughts, questions, and other feedback (please see our Contributing Guide for more information).