Duration: October 2022 - November 2024
Team: Katherine Skinner, Lauren Collister, Tania Hernández, Daechan Kim, Aboli Shete
Funder: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Skillset: Convening / Facilitation
Overview
Getting open science cloud infrastructure into the hands of communities is one challenge. Building the local ownership and understanding that makes it last is another. That gap is especially pronounced in under-resourced biomedical research communities in Latin America and Africa, where the tools may technically be available but the conditions for sustained, participatory use often aren't.
The Catalyst Project, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), was a consortium effort to close that gap. 2i2c, The Carpentries, CSCCE, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science worked together to deploy and manage open cloud infrastructure for these communities, build training and pedagogical content, and develop a service model that could outlast the grant. IOI joined as the partner responsible for co-designing the governance and sustainability model: the shared framework that would clarify how infrastructure providers and local community partners could work together, make decisions together, and hold each other accountable over time.
What we did
Deploying infrastructure and building genuine community engagement in parallel is complex work. Building shared decision-making structures required first building shared understanding. So while IOI came into the project planning to co-design the governance and sustainability model, we heard from the other partners, saw a different ground-truth need, and focused on what would bring the most value: building communication and trust across the consortium and within the communities themselves.
We hosted a series of structured conversations with consortium members and community participants, oriented around shared goals, expectations, and what meaningful collaboration would actually look like for groups with different levels of technical experience, different organizational cultures, and different ideas about what success meant. We also conducted research into governance and sustainability practices across comparable cloud and open-source computational services, giving the consortium a clearer picture of what had worked elsewhere.
Outcomes
Thanks to the Catalyst Project, open science cloud services were deployed and made available to communities in Latin America and Africa for a pilot period lasting two years. Researchers in these communities gained access to infrastructure they hadn't had before, along with training on how to leverage it.
IOI built the relational and communicative foundations for the collaborative effort. We also established relationships with communities in Latin America and Africa that have continued into future projects, a deeper understanding of what governance readiness requires in practice, and additional experience facilitating multi-stakeholder conversations across different contexts, cultures, and organizational structures.
The groundwork laid here has continued to support collaborations among participants.
The speed of trust
Shared infrastructure for global communities sounds straightforward until you're in a room with people whose institutions, resources, languages, and expectations are diverse. Getting from "we all agree that open science matters" to "here is how we will make decisions together" requires a lot of intermediate work, most of which doesn't appear in grant reports.
If you're building or funding open infrastructure for communities that have historically been excluded from how these tools are designed, IOI can help you think through what the process actually requires, not just the output. Get in touch.
Our impact, by the numbers
- Collaboration through the Catalyst Project provided cloud services and training for 9 organizations in Africa and 10 organizations in Latin America who participated in the project as Community Partners.
- IOI provided detailed governance studies on the participating organizations, culminating in a report. This report provided the foundation for future collaborations among the participants.
