Duration: 2024 – present
Team: Chrys Wu, Lauren Collister, Emmy Tsang, Sarah Lippincott, Katherine Skinner, Gail Steinhart
Funders: Mellon Foundation, Arcadia, Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, National Science Foundation, Sustaining Circle members
Skillset: Ecosystem Intelligence, Landscape Analysis
Overview
The open infrastructure landscape is large and growing but the information needed to navigate it is scattered, inconsistent and held by no neutral party with a view across the whole. There are platforms, standards, repositories, and persistent identifier services doing important work, but they can be difficult to discover and even harder to evaluate side by side. For funders, that made it difficult to direct resources well. For adopters, it made decision-making slower and riskier than it needed to be. And for the infrastructures themselves, it made visibility a persistent challenge.
IOI, funded by the Mellon Foundation, set out to build something practical: a public tool that gave both funders and adopters the clear, verified, comparable information they needed.
What we did
Before building anything, we needed to understand what funders and adopters actually needed. IOI’s position at the intersection of both stakeholder groups meant that we knew who to talk to and what the real questions were. We spoke with more than 40 institutional budget holders and 26 infrastructure service providers in one-on-one meetings, focus groups, and user testing sessions.
From there, we built Infra Finder as a public-facing product: a searchable, filterable database of open infrastructures that could grow with input from the community. Each entry covers the areas that matter most to evaluators: technical attributes, governance, community engagement, key policies, and funding models — each area a different facet of what it means to be "open".
Getting the information right required more than a one-time data collection effort. We also built the workflows to source, validate, and keep that information current, working directly with infrastructure providers to make sure what users find in the tool is accurate and up to date. A comparison view lets users look at up to four services side by side, with links to deeper detail where they need it.
Outcomes
Infra Finder launched with coverage of 57 infrastructure services and has since grown to more than 130 thanks to community input.
For funders, it offers a clearer view of the landscape than existed before, with enough detail to inform real investment decisions. For adopters, it shortens the research process and reduces the risk of choosing infrastructure that turns out to be a poor fit.
For the infrastructures themselves, it creates a new kind of visibility. As Niels Stern, Managing Director of the OAPEN Foundation, put it: "Participating in this tool provides us with the opportunity to disseminate a lot of information in a very concise way and be more transparent about what we do. This is useful because we can share our entries with institutions, funders, and anyone who wants to work with us or is interested in learning more about our work."
That transparency matters. Open infrastructure often does essential work quietly, without the visibility that helps funders find it or institutions trust it. Infra Finder was built on the premise that better information, in one place, for everyone, changes that dynamic.
Impact by the numbers
In the two years since its inception, Infra Finder has become a go-to resource for open infrastructure diligence in the scholarly community. The site has received over 30,000+ visits, 40,000+ unique pageviews from 130 countries globally since launch. Of these numbers, close to 7,000 returning visits (23% of total visits), highlighting its value as a trusted resource.
Finding your way through the landscape
The open infrastructure ecosystem does not stand still. Platforms emerge, mature, merge, and sometimes close. Funding models shift. The expectations placed on infrastructure by institutions, by policy, and by researchers keep growing. Keeping track of what exists, what it does, and whether it is still the right fit for your needs is genuinely hard work.
If you're trying to make better decisions about where to invest or what to adopt, Infra Finder is a great place to start. And if you need support thinking through what those decisions actually require, we would love to chat!
