Goals and strategy#
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 face too much accidental complexity that distracts them from their mission. They struggle with technical barriers to deploying and managing the infrastructure they need, and face social barriers in navigating the complex open source ecosystems that power their work. They are often forced to choose between proprietary services that risk vendor lock-in and ignore the community’s unique identity, or managing their own infrastructure at the cost of their actual research.
At the same time, open source communities are builders, not service providers. They provide crucial infrastructure for scientific research, but are often under-resourced and lack the capacity to run reliable services or offer direct support to users. 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.
By bridging this gap with sustainable, shared services, we can resolve the accidental complexity of infrastructure management and bring these communities into close proximity. This turns a negative loop into a virtuous cycle of co-creation, where research and education directly guides and supports the open source ecosystem. Our goal is to build this service in a way that is sustainable and scalable.
Our guiding policy#
Standardize the commodity-level infrastructure to efficiently deliver a service that gets communities 80% of the way there. Reinvest these efficiency gains into cultivating our community network. Leverage that network to orchestrate advancements that drive the ecosystem forward.
We root this policy in the following theory for impact:
Reliably running a hub service is a commodity. By treating it as a commodity layer you can take for granted, we minimize the “drag” on research and education and allow them to focus on their work. While it must provide a high degree of reliability and trust, the true value of this technical infrastructure is not in its existence alone.
Here’s our unique value: We believe that by combining a shared platform that provides standardized infrastructure with a service team deeply embedded in the ecosystem, we bring communities into close technical and social proximity to have leveraged impact and sustainability.
A shared platform creates technical leverage: By running community-specific hubs on a single standardized platform, we create technical proximity. This allows us to efficiently solve hard problems once and push improvements to everyone at the same time.
Service facilitates connection: Because we manage relationships with both our communities and the open source ecosystem, we can act as a bridge. We help communities navigate this network of collaborators, cross-pollinating knowledge to solve shared problems.
Connection enables collaboration: This social proximity allows us to coordinate efforts that generate and channel resources. We help communities pool their funding, expertise, and capacity to tackle challenges that no single community could solve alone.
Collaboration fuels the Ecosystem: We channel these resources and contributions back into the open source tools we rely on. This turns the “negative feedback loop” of the challenge into a virtuous cycle: better tools lead to better research, which leads to more resources for the tools.
By focusing this engine on the research and education communities, we can identify shared needs and workflows that allow us to carry out the strategy above at scale. This will drive resources and improvements into the broader ecosystem in order to advance our mission.
Our strategic priorities#
To carry this out we must make strategic progress in a few key functional areas, defined below.
Platform and infrastructure#
Automate the commodity infrastructure to focus on network-wide enhancements.
Automate our commodity infrastructure baseline: Minimize the manual effort required to operate our network of hubs. Automate repetitive tasks. De-prioritize enhancements that do not benefit most of our member network. Develop tools that allow communities to self-serve their own customization.
Focus our freed-up engineering capacity to solve problems that benefit everyone. This means improving the shared platform’s capabilities and contributing features directly to upstream projects. We measure success by how much we grow the ceiling for all of our community members.
We will know this is working when our platform team spends 80% of its time engaging with our communities and developing new enhancements for our infrastructure, rather than toil and reacting to problems.
Services and community relationships#
Minimize reactive support to focus on pro-actively connecting with our community network.
Reduce the volume of basic technical support (e.g., login issues, basic usage, etc). Prioritize documentation, self-service tools, and community peer-support channels to handle routine inquiries.
Focus our freed-up time on actively connecting our members. Help researchers navigate open source dynamics, translate their needs into technical roadmaps, and facilitate cross-community learning. Focus on interactions that help communities leverage the platform and one another’s learning to achieve their mission.
We will know this is working when we spend our time orchestrating and facilitating learning from our communities, rather than reacting to their requests.
Business Development:#
Standardize recurring revenue with a model that naturally leads to high-impact contracts.
Memberships cover our core services: Price memberships to be fully self-sustaining. This revenue must cover our critical infrastructure, our open source support, and our core investment in community relationships. This is our core cost of doing business, ensuring that the basic existence of our network funds the mission of the organization.
Make ecosystem improvements with co-funding: Because we have an engaged membership base with similar needs, we can aggregate demand for new capabilities, allowing multiple members to split the cost of strategic enhancements. Use this leverage to fund targeted improvements that advance our platform or servicesin new ways.
We will know this is working when the majority of our revenue comes from contracts, and the majority of our contract revenue is recurring.