The Incubator is designed to deepen the impact of research-based recommendations surrounding the sustainability of open source digital infrastructure.
This program is rooted in CS&S’s work building community and pathways to sustainability for open source projects in the service of the public interest.
Our preparation for this program is informed by an interdisciplinary investigation of digital infrastructure; sustainability, maintenance, innovation, and repair; community management; theories of change; and collective organizing.
This is an incomplete list of things we have read, are reading, and are thinking with:
- Benkler, Yochai. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. New York: Random House, 2011.
- brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.
- Bloom, Greg. “The Principles of Governing Open Source Commons.” SustainOSS, 2020.
- The Digital Infrastructure Research Program Collaborative Notes Bibliography.
- Educopia, “Community Cultivation: A Field Guide.” Atlanta, GA: Educopia Institute Publications, 2018.
- Eghbal, Nadia. “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor behind Our Digital Infrastructure.” Ford Foundation, 2016.
- ____. Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. San Fransisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2020.
- Freeman, Jo. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” 1972.
- Konrad Hinsen, “Dealing with Software Collapse.” Computing in Science and Engineering 21(3): 2019.
- Jackson, Steven L. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie et al. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
- Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
- Katz, Daniel. “Fundamentals of Software Sustainability” 2018.
- O’Shea, Lizzie. Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology. London: Verso, 2019.
- Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press: 2015.
- Project Summaries, 2018 Ford/Sloan Digital Infrastructure Grants
- Ribes, David and Thomas Finholt. “The Long Now of Technology Infrastructure: Articulating Tensions in Development.” Journal for the Association of Information Systems (JAIS) 10(5): 2019.
- Siegel Foundation, “Infrastructure Influences Everything.” Siegel Family Endowment, 2020.
- Vinsel, Lee and Andrew Russel. The Innovation Delusion. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
- Ziser, Michael. “Living with Speculative Infrastructures.” Boom 3(4): 2013.
More resources and programming details to come!
The Digital Infrastructure Incubator is managed by Rayya El Zein, PhD. Rayya comes to CS&S after a decade conducting ethnographic research on change within creative communities in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Her work as an editor has focused on bridging academic research and community practices. She brings a global, interdisciplinary perspective to her work and tweets occasionally from @rayelz.
rayya@codeforsociety.org