We are up and running! October and November saw accepted participants begin their work in the incubator and the first public events accompanying the program. (The next letter will share some resources from the first module of the incubator curriculum and some reflections on sustainability and infrastructure. Stay tuned!)
In mid August, we opened Council Data Project
The Council Data Project builds digital infrastructures to increase the accessibility of municipal legislation.
Incubator participants: Jackson M. Brown and Nicholas Weber
The Citation File Format is a human- and machine-readable plaintext file format to provide citation metadata for software (or datasets), so that they can be cited correctly.
Incubator participant: Stephan Druskat
Ersilia Open Source Initiative
EOSI strengthens research capacity against neglected diseases via the democratization of AI/ML tools.
Incubator participants: Gemma Turon and Miquel Duran-Frigola
SolarProtocol is a global network of small scale off-grid solar powered web servers that direct traffic based on whichever device is in the most sunlight.
Incubator participants: Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, Benedetta Piantella
Building Community around the R Development Guide
The "R Development Guide" is written to facilitate the on-boarding of new contributors to the R development process. Incubator participants: Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal and Heather Turner
Contextualizing FAIR Principles in the MENA Region
This project explores the cultural infrastructure components for a contextualization of the FAIR principles, one of the most important practices in Open Science, in the Arabic-speaking world.
Incubator participant: Batool Almarzouq
To read more about the projects and the work they will be doing in the incubator, check them out on our website, here.
Building Laterally
In October, the Digital Infrastructure Incubator hosted its first public event accompanying the program. "Labor across the Tech Ecoystem" hosted a panel of whistle-blowers and organizers and gathered perspectives on what building sustainable work looks like in the gig economy, in big tech, and in startups. It is the first event of 5 in a new public series, Building Laterally: Political Imagination to Support & Sustain Digital Infrastructure. Check out next month's event on Anti-Oppression Frameworks in F/LOSS coming up on December 8, 2021.
Background
Part of the Digital Infrastructure RFP, the Digital Infrastructure Incubator is designed to amplify the impact of research-based recommendations for best practices concerning sustainability, governance, and community health in digital public infrastructure projects. To that end, the cohort program hosts 6 open source projects as they iterate solutions around a sociotechnical challenge their projects face. Incubator participants each receive a $5,000 stipend in addition to curated bibliographies, selections of prototypes, one-on-one sessions with mentors, and opportunities to connect and share with the cohort as well as the larger CS&S network of projects and experience.
Featured image by erin mckenna on Unsplash.