Stories we didn’t tell
In our interviews we came across aspects and stories that didn’t make it into the report, but that we still find worth telling.
In our interviews we came across aspects and stories that didn’t make it into the report, but that we still find worth telling.
In our interviews, people who work on infrastructure projects also recommended very concrete measures how funding could better suit their needs. Here is an overview on ideas that go beyond funding for projects or products.
We gathered our insights in the report Roadwork ahead: Evaluating the needs of FOSS communities working on digital infrastructure in the public interest.
As I learned at the MirageOS retreat, good community work is about three things: Giving people time and space to deepen social ties, but in a way that suits them individually; daring to let go of structure and become all about participation in order to build up energy and motivation for the time between the retreats; and providing really, really good food.
Human-centered research equals the “active consultation of people” (Hanington 2010) and as a method is viable to approach a broader subject in order to map it out. For IDE, this means conducting lots and lots of interviews with people who work on open infrastructure projects. But we don’t pretend to know which questions are the…
What it takes to base a research project on Open Digital Infrastructure We do not only conduct research about Open Digital Infrastructure. Of course that is our main focus, but we set ourselves a side goal: To do credible work, we decided to rely on Open Source applications wherever possible. This is not just an…
As we set out to formulate our research hypothesis, one central question remained contested: What does open digital infrastructure actually mean? Interpretations vary from information technology standards or their implementations to tools and services that enable developers to do their work. For us, neither on their own seemed promising: Mere standards as laid down by…
When we got the great news that the Ford Foundation had accepted our research proposal and we saw all the great projects that are in our cohort, it was time to look back to how it began. Julia had co-founded the Prototype Fund, a funding program for freelance software developers based in Germany, in 2016….