Duration: January 2025 – January 2026
Team: Katherine Skinner, Chrys Wu, Lauren Collister, Sarah Lippincott
Funder: Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund
Skillset: Convening / Facilitation, Landscape Analysis
Overview
Institutions continue to underinvest in open infrastructure, even as the risks of proprietary lock-in have become harder to ignore. The open tools, standards, and platforms the research community needs remain underfunded and underadopted relative to their proprietary alternatives — not because the alternatives are better, but because the decision-making processes these institutions use are murky.
Frameworks designed to help guide those decisions do exist. What has been missing is knowledge about how decision-makers actually use them, what information they rely on when evaluating infrastructure choices, and what they fundamentally value when deciding whether to adopt, fund, or invest.
With funding from the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, IOI set out to answer questions about how existing community health frameworks resonate with decision-makers and what themes matter most for incentivising investment and adoption of open infrastructure for research.
What we did
We conducted one-on-one interviews with decision-makers across the research and scholarship ecosystem, including university libraries and open source programme offices, research institutions, open infrastructure communities, and philanthropies. The goal was to understand how institutions actually evaluate infrastructure choices — what matters to them, what gives them confidence, and what makes them hesitate.
We then brought participants together to workshop the themes that had emerged, testing whether the patterns held across the group.
What we found
Awareness of formal community health frameworks is low, even among people whose job involves evaluating open infrastructure. What decision-makers were relying on instead was trust: peer recommendations, word of mouth, and case studies from institutions they respected. In the absence of structured evaluation tools, community reputation fills the gap.
Our research identified 11 themes that consistently shaped adoption and investment decisions, spanning practical concerns like affordability, technical requirements, and governance transparency, alongside less tangible signals like community culture and fiscal security.
One theme was the single commonality across every participant: data sovereignty, meaning ownership, portability, and control. Regardless of institution type or role, the question of whether an infrastructure would protect their collections or hold them hostage surfaced in almost every conversation. In a landscape where even "open access" content in closed systems has proven vulnerable, this is not an abstract concern.
Resilience emerged as another key theme, particularly among funders, who were careful to hold it separately from longevity. Longevity looks backward (has this infrastructure survived past challenges?), while resilience looks forwards (can it adapt to what comes next?) That includes financial stability through funding fluctuations, technical adaptability as tools and demands evolve, and the kind of distributed organizational capacity that means no single person's departure puts everything at risk.
Our full findings are publicly available at investinopen.org.
Why it matters
Decision-makers across the open infrastructure ecosystem have been working without a shared vocabulary for what they need and why.
This research uncovered more detail about what adopters, funders, and infrastructure providers are looking for, and how they make decisions about open infrastructures; concrete evidence that framework authors and developers can use to make their work more legible to the people it's meant to serve.
We’re already applying these findings to inform the work we do with clients and the community. IOI's Infra Finder tool includes information organizations can use to determine how infrastructures align with their values. Open infrastructures that engage with values frameworks self report which ones in the "Community Engagement" section.
If you want to understand how these findings might apply to your own decision-making or funding strategy, we would love to talk with you!
Project outputs
Blog Posts
- Collister, L., Wu, C., Lippincott, S., & Skinner, K. (2026, March 13.) Building trust through values: What we learned from the MoCHI project. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://investinopen.org/blog/building-trust-through-values/
- Skinner, K., Wu, C., Lippincott, S., & Collister, L. (2025, October 3.) What do institutions need to know before choosing open infrastructure? Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://investinopen.org/blog/what-do-institutions-need-to-know-before-choosing-open-infrastructure/
- Tsang, E. (2025, June 19.) Building bridges: How trust and community health frameworks can strengthen open infrastructure decision-making. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://investinopen.org/blog/building-bridges-how-trust-and-community-health-frameworks-can-strengthen-open-infrastructure-decision-making/
- Skinner, K., & Tsang, E. (2024, November 25). Announcing our new research on community health assessments for open infrastructure. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://investinopen.org/blog/announcing-our-new-research-on-community-health-assessments-for-open-infrastructure/
Reports and Report Sections
- Collister, L., Wu, C., Lippincott, S., & Skinner, K. (2026). “Building trust through values: Measurement of Community Health Indicators (MoCHI) project report.” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18929158
- "Trust, transparency, and technology: Do community health frameworks share open infrastructure decisions?" In 2025 State of Open Infrastructure Report. https://investinopen.org/state-of-open-infrastructure-2025/sooi-signals-from-the-field-2025/#trust-transparency-and-technology-do-community-health-frameworks-shape-open-infrastructure-decisions
Podcasts
- CHAOSScast, 12 June 2025. "Community health metrics and open infrastructure decision making – with Chrys Wu, Invest in Open Infrastructure."
Grant Proposal
- Skinner, K., Collister, L., & Wu, C. (2025). Grant Proposal: Incentivizing Investment in and Adoption of Open Infrastructure for Research through Community Health Assessments. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15052274
