Digital Infrastructure Research RFP - Ford Foundation

"Everything in our modern society, from hospitals to banks to social media platforms, runs on software. Nearly all of this software is built on “digital infrastructure,” a foundation of free and public code that is designed to solve common challenges. The benefits of digital infrastructure are numerous: it can reduce the cost of setting up new businesses, support data-driven discovery across research disciplines, enable complex technologies such as smartphones to talk to each other, and allow everyone to have access to important innovations like encryption that would otherwise be too expensive. Sharing code to address common challenges is in principle cheaper, easier and more efficient. It should also be noted that our digital infrastructure is a distinct part of, and inextricably tied to, a larger ecosystem of open source software development. While the collective action problems that characterize infrastructure funding are well-explored, the economics of digital infrastructure are less well-understood. In 2016, the Ford Foundation funded a report by Nadia Eghbal titled “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure” that described how the development and maintenance of digital infrastructure often falls to communities of volunteers who take it upon themselves to maintain this infrastructure in their own free time and for little or no money. Unsurprisingly, this leads to significant risks to the open internet and the ability to develop new, innovative research and businesses within it. The Sloan and Ford Foundations would like to fund a set of research projects to further study these dynamics, with an eye toward better understanding the economics, maintenance and sustainability of digital infrastructure...."