Service model

Service model#

This page describes how we engage with member communities and fund our work. It’s the primary way we implement our strategy. For persona-driven messaging about outcomes for stakeholders, see our value proposition.

Membership overview#

Our primary engagement model is membership in a network. This centers our mission-driven nature, and builds a feeling of mutual support and status between our member organizations.

Membership primarily drives cycles of a development and operations flywheel: membership comes with standardized managed infrastructure, and drives cycles of collaborative and co-funded project work that improve the infrastructure for everyone.

This creates a collaborative flywheel where our relatively small team can efficiently manage infrastructure and facilitate collaboration between many different communities to support open source development.

  • Framing: Membership is a way to pool resources on a shared service team (operations, development, and community engagement).

  • Cost recovery: Membership covers core costs in operations, engagement, and upstream support.

  • Benefit:

    • Participation in our core DevOps system.

    • Comes with managed infrastructure. This ensures we have a cycle between operations and development work.

    • Access to spaces and conversations communities otherwise would not have.

    • A way for communities to pool resources to contribute upstream.

Membership#

Our target business model includes membership with an optional “Premier membership” upgrade:

Membership

  • For: Discrete communities with a homogeneous user base (e.g., a single research group or collaboration).

  • Impact: The core loop that sustains 2i2c and covers the cost of making open infrastructure accessible and supported with foundational contributions.

  • Offers:

    • Site Reliability Engineering for managed infrastructure.

    • Basic guidance in usage.

    • Participation in roadmapping exercises and co-funding opportunities.

Premier membership option (strategic for some communities)

  • For: Strategic partners that want deeper engagement or investment in open source development. Usually serve more than one community that fits our membership profile.

  • Impact: Drives deeper engagement and investment in open source, strategic guidance for 2i2c, and larger-scale growth within a community.

  • Offers:

    • Strategic-level engagement from 2i2c, with more direction over our roadmap.

    • Coordination and guidance in planning and delivering technical improvements.

    • Tighter feedback loops and reporting between development and operations.

Accessible service mechanism (WIP, described as “Starter” membership; not currently prioritized)

  • For: Communities that need standardized, commodity infrastructure with minimal customization.

  • Offers: Commodified SRE evolving with open source. Automated operations with community-driven support.

  • Impact: Makes open infrastructure largely accessible, even to communities that cannot cover the costs of foundational contributions and development.

Co-funded projects with members#

Project-based work gives members a way to influence our new development, and make it possible with funding. It is the engine that drives innovation and enhancement of our shared technical system.

  • For: Any member organization that wants their infrastructure to be better (we do not distinguish between members with Premier membership and other members for co-funding).

  • Cost recovery: Covers all R&D-style costs for new development.

  • Benefits:

    • A mechanism to fund fractions of new development work to make it more likely to happen faster.

    • Engages communities to talk about shared problems, and to learn from one another.

    • A way to get credit for supporting open source infrastructure development.

How membership and project work feed into one another#

Each line of business benefits from network effects, and crucially depends on our development work and our operations work feeding into one another. As the number of member communities grows:

  • They share more of the cost of operations, which decreases cost of service or increases support for open infrastructure.

  • They increase the resources available for new development, which benefits the entire network.

  • They have a larger group of communities to learn from, which increases learning and adoption of new workflows.