Kaitlin Thaney on IOI’s “Mapping the Costs of Open Infrastructure” Project
From an Invest in Open Infrastructure Blog Post by Kaitlin Thaney:
Over the next few months, we’ll be working to interview project leads, budget holders, and funders invested in open infrastructure to learn more about the underlying development and maintenance costs for leading infrastructure projects, map existing sources of funding and capital, and examine additional sources of information to further inform funders and drie adoption of these tools and systems.
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In order to support decision making within the open infrastructure landscape, we are proposing three distinct areas of development and exploration.
This is designed to examine the current state of publicly available fiscal data (funding information for OI projects as well as their spending information) as well as the “hidden” or under-reported costs of open infrastructure.
Areas of focus:
- Development of a framework and criteria to assess & describe open infrastructure;
- An exploration and audit of the status-quo of public fiscal & organizational data;
- Investigation into the “hidden” costs of operating open infrastructures & points of resource scarcity.
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We’ll be sharing more about these pieces of work and what we’re learning over the coming weeks. For more detail, check out our Project Plan.
Read the Complete Blog Post (474 words)
See Also: Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) 2021-2024 Strategic Plan Now Available (June 30, 2021)
Filed under: Data Files, Funding, Interviews, News, Profiles

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.