One of our core values at IOI is openness, and as part of living that through our work, we wanted to share more about what we’re working on and what we’re learning from each week. These posts are designed to serve as snapshots into how we work and what we’re currently thinking through as a team.

We’ll be iterating on this format as the weeks progress. Have a question or comment about anything you see here? Get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.

On to this week’s update …

What we’re working on:

  • We kicked off IOI’s first Strategy Retreat. Our organization-wide Strategy Retreat began this week, with 20 participants from our Steering Committee, Community Council, and staff. Over the course of the next month we’ll be exploring ideas together about money, investment, non-profit effectiveness, ways of working, and courage. This retreat is fully virtual, with participation across seven time zones. Stay tuned for more on the retreat and changes to IOI governance over the coming weeks!
  • We compiled an Orientation Guide for those new to our work, which includes an organizational timeline of IOI’s work to date, key priorities, staff and governance documentation, and more about our current and past funding. This is designed as a public resource that we will be updating annually.
  • Research from our 2021 Fellows is now available! We've recently wrapped up documentation of our 2021 Research Fellows program, funded by the Sloan Foundation. Outputs include a working paper on Wikidata, a report on attitudes about government support, and a video recording of project presentations.
  • Synthesis and documentation for the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) project. We've gotten a lot of feedback after our launch last month. We continue to gather feedback and plan for the next stage of this work beyond this initial prototype. We're currently finalizing documentation based on the wonderful feedback we received in our community information sessions with particular attention to defining the key terms we use in our evaluation of services, as well as a more detailed description of our methodology and approach. We're in conversation with providers to understand how we might best scale the application. As we discussed in the information sessions, creating the data for this application was a labor intensive process. Moving forward with this work, we want to find a more manageable and scalable approach to collecting, curating, and reviewing the available data. We look forward to sharing our roadmap for this application in the near future for feedback. In the meantime, please feel free to share any feedback by emailing catalog@investinopen.org.

Team updates:

  • Welcoming Emmy Tsang to the team! New IOI Engagement Lead, Emmy Tsang, began work this week. Her role will focus on IOI’s mission-driven participation and engagement strategies.
  • Staffing changes (+ promotions): We also welcomed Anne Britton, one of IOI’s inaugural Research Fellows, to the team as Project Coordinator. Richard Dunks, IOI’s former research data analyst, also was promoted to the Director of Research & Strategy position. For more about the existing staff visit our Who We Are page. (You can also read more about these roles and access our archive of job descriptions here).

What we’re reading:

Our retreat and staff changes prompt some deep thinking about IOI as an organization. We'd like to share a couple of resources useful to us as we grow and evolve.

Posted by Kaitlin Thaney