Duration: 2022-2025
Team: Jerry Sellanga, Kaitlin Thaney, Naomi Penfold, Tania Hernandez, Katherine Skinner, Emmy Tsang,
Funders: University of Buffalo Library, Simons Foundation
Skillset: Collective Funding, Convening / Facilitation, Governance Model Development, Strategic Planning, Ecosystem Intelligence
Overview
Open infrastructure in low-resource settings faces a persistent problem: chronic underfunding and a lack of community input to direct and prioritize where the funds should go. This means that often, the funding that exists doesn't reach where it could make the greatest impact.
IOI set out to test a different approach. What if the community shaped where funds went before funds were distributed?
What we did
We created an Open Infrastructure Fund with a participatory funding model. This model meant the fund scope would be co-designed with community members who would answer: What should this fund prioritize?
We then conducted a participatory budgeting exercise at the IOI Funders Summit in 2022, where over 80 participants allocated a pool of $130,000 USD — 60% of which was reserved for projects in low- and middle-income economies. In the process, the community surfaced the most pressing funding priorities. From there, we ran a public funding design survey and hosted in-person community conversations in Accra, Ghana, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, drawing in perspectives from the regions we most wanted to serve.
By the time the fund parameters were set, more than 100 stakeholders had helped shape them. The result was a fund focused on three areas prioritized through community input: capacity building, community governance, and critical shared infrastructure. Applications were accepted and reviewed in both English and Spanish to reduce barriers to entry.
Outcomes
The call received 197 applications from 51 countries. All applications were made publicly accessible and reviewed openly. Eight projects were funded across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, spanning health data infrastructure, open science, and digital repositories.
The projects the fund supported reflect what community-led prioritisation actually produces. Funded work included developing infrastructure for the responsible use of health data in Argentina, building open hardware capacity for biomedical research in Ghana, preserving indigenous cultural heritage in Chile, and strengthening community governance for a rapidly growing bioimaging network across Latin America. These are not the kinds of projects that tend to surface through conventional funding channels. They came forward because the fund was designed to find them.
The pilot demonstrated something worth paying attention to: when communities help design the funding process, the applications that come in are more diverse, more specific, and more grounded in real need. That's not a coincidence.
Funding that reaches further
Deciding where to direct resources in open infrastructure is challenging, especially across regions and contexts that most funders don't have direct relationships with. Community participation in fund design isn't just a values choice; it's a practical one. It changes what gets funded and who gets to benefit.
If you're a funder thinking about how to structure investments in open infrastructure, or an organization looking to understand how participatory models might work in your context, we'd love to talk.
Our impact, by the numbers
8 funded projects in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe
We funded 8 projects, from developing infrastructure and capacity for the responsible use of health data in Argentina, to modelling a collaborative review process for climate justice knowledge.
197 applications from 51 countries
All Open Infrastructure Fund applications are publicly accessible and reviewed. To increase the accessibility of funds to LMIEs, applications were submitted and reviewed in both English and Spanish.
Piloting a participatory funding model
The Open Infrastructure Fund began with a participatory budgeting process at the IOI Funders Summit 2022, where participants allocated a pot of 130,000 USD to identify the three top funding priorities. To ensure that the Fund addresses community needs, we refined the scope and parameters of the Fund by running a public funding design survey and hosting conversations in Accra, Ghana and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
