The Digital Infrastructure Incubator is CS&S's newest initiative building community and pathways to sustainability in open source in the public interest.
We are excited to announce our first cohort! Please join us in welcoming the following exciting projects:
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 participants: 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
Background & Overview
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 will host 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.
Our call for submissions of expressions of interest was open from mid August to mid September. We received 49 submissions from projects all over the world in all growth stages. After difficult deliberations we accepted 6 projects, grouped in 3 thematic pairs. While we anticipate significant cross-over and cross-fertilization between the three pairings, we considered the aspect of “pairing” might be useful within the cohort, considering the wide range of disciplines, experiences, and project purviews hosted.
- Projects in the governance focus area are open source projects dependent on volunteer labor that are working to build a transparent decision-making model that scales with growth; identify clear pathways to leadership; distribute power from one or two “benevolent dictators”; et al.
- Projects in the community engagement focus areas are teams that are learning how to build in the open; how to engage and retain developers, volunteers, and interested public; and how to build those audiences into the structure (documentation, governance) of their projects.
- Two projects are led by independent researcher-practitioners thinking about the on-ramps to open science and open software. These two teams are considering how to build the cultural infrastructure needed to further open science and open software among communities where the exposure to working in the open is minimal or doesn’t exist at all.
Teams are based in the US, Germany, South Africa, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and India.
To read more about the projects, check out public events running in this program, and more check out the Digital Infrastructure Incubator website here.
To stay up to date with this program, the resources built for its first cohort, follow our TinyLetter here.