Digital Infrastructure: Equity & Sustainability in Open Source
The Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in partnership with the Mozilla and Open Society Foundation hosted this event to explore equity and sustainability in Open Source.
This webinar featured a panel discussion and Q&A with researchers from our 2019 grantee cohort: Laura Dabbish, (Carnegie Mellon University), Caroline Sinders, Anushah Hossain (UC Berkeley) & Thomas Streinz (New York University).
The conversation also addressed the 2020 call for proposals to further this field of work and held a Q&A for interested applicants.
About the Speakers:
Laura Dabbish, Carnegie Mellon University: How might structural factors in the social networks of open-source communities pose barriers to underrepresented newcomers, especially women, becoming full community members?
Caroline Sinders, independent researcher: What can the history of Javascript teach us about techniques to mitigate harassment (a barrier to diversity and a threat to the sustainability of digital infrastructure projects) in open-source communities?
Anushah Hossain, UC Berkeley: What factors encourage and sustain international communities of contributors to open-source projects?
Thomas Streinz, Institute for International Law & Justice & Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies, NYU School of Law: How can legal devices and institutions be adapted and applied, both locally and transnationally, to overcome the under-maintenance of critical digital infrastructure?
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. But this free, public code—which we refer to as open source software—needs regular upkeep and maintenance, just as physical infrastructure does, and because it doesn’t belong to any one person or party, it is no one person’s job to maintain it. Despite the importance of this infrastructure, the community that maintains it lacks the diversity of the society it is meant to serve. And more work is needed to better engage the international communities that undergird this ecosystem, as well as the international legal and regulatory mechanisms for sustainability.
