A bright question mark in a dark room

Asking the right questions

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…

view along a historic steel bridge

Walking the Walk

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…

What Open Digital Infrastructure Means to Us

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…

Why IDE?

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….