Our theory for how we can best achieve our mission in the long term. Our strategy describes more concrete guiding policies and actions we must take to follow this theory.
The challenge¶
Research and Education communities are trapped in a choice between managing fragile bespoke infrastructure or paying for proprietary silos. This fragmentation prevents them from leveraging their collective power and contributing back to the open source tools they rely on.
Communities in research and education struggle with:
Technical barriers to deploying and managing the infrastructure they need
Social barriers in navigating the open source ecosystems that power their work.
They often have to choose between proprietary services that risk vendor lock-in and ignore the community’s unique identity, or self-managed infrastructure that distracts from their actual research.
At the same time, open source communities are builders, not service providers. They create crucial infrastructure for scientific research, but are under-resourced to provide managed services or dedicated support. This leaves research communities with the burden of managing complex infrastructure themselves, or turning to proprietary vendors who do not share their values.
This disconnect creates a negative feedback loop: Research communities are trapped in inefficient silos, unable to contribute back to the tools they use. Open source communities lack the resources and engagement they need to thrive.
Our theory of impact¶
By creating a high-bandwidth connection between people developing technology in open source, operating the technology as a managed service, and using the technology in research domains, we can improve the effectiveness and speed with which new development serves the research community.
Make cloud environments accessible by removing the accidental complexity of managed infrastructure: By offering a sustainable, shared infrastructure service, we can resolve the accidental complexity of infrastructure management so communities can focus on their work.
Align community workflows with standardized, open technology. By using standard, community-driven tools, we align the workflows of each community we serve. This makes it easier for them to learn from one another, and for us to serve them all at once.
Facilitate learning between communities by actively engaging them: By creating pathways for communities to share and learn from one another, and facilitating their collaboration, they can more efficiently gain inspiration from one another’s workflows. This makes new ideas, tools, and methodologies spread faster across communities.
Facilitate design and development on behalf of all communities: With a network of communities that have aligned workflows, shared technology, and mechanisms to learn from one another, we can identify opportunities for enhancements that serve them all, and leverage our community network to identify fundin to make it happen.
Implement enhancements in open communities. By building our service entirely with open tools, any new development supports the open ecosystem, and can be rapidly used by anybody in the world (including our communities).
Deploy these enhancements to the entire network. By developing in partnership with our operations team, we can quickly prototype, learn, and iterate on new ideas, and get them in the hands of research communities quickly.
This turns a negative loop into a virtuous cycle of co-creation. By managing infrastructure for our communities, and enhancing open source tools with their guidance, we drive resources into open source communities and ensure they represent the interests of research and education.
As the tools improve, so does the managed infrastructure for each community, growing the value of membership for our entire network, and growing the value of open infrastructure for the world.
2i2c’s virtuous cycle of co-creation. See above for a deeper description.