Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund Missive 1/2026
Dear Readers,
We're currently busy (and excited!) launching the final reports from Cohort 4 — and at the same time, during this very active and visible period, the operational phase of the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund is coming to a planned, orderly end this October. Read more below.
But before that happens, there's a surprise: one last limited Open Call for Research Questions, closing out the Fund the way it started — with exploration.
This issue covers that call and a first wave of new reports from Cohorts 3 & 4. A second newsletter will follow in early October. So this isn't really an ending — it's the beginning of D//F's next iteration.
Overview
- A final limited open call for research questions — due 7 September 2026
- D//F's afterlife: from open grant-making to independent knowledge partner and advisor
- New reports (Cohorts 3 & 4): DPI in India, FOSS and community connectivity in Brazil, "What comes after FOSS?", Funding the Web, MoCHI, and DIGITCORE
A final open call: new areas of inquiry
For its final limited RFP, D//F is commissioning a small set of short reports on emerging questions at the intersection of open digital infrastructure, criticality, sustainability, and the public interest. The call takes stock of where the ecosystem for open digital infrastructure stands — and points to the questions that now need closer attention. In spirit, it echoes our inaugural 2018 survey.
It is not exclusive to prior or current grantees, and we're looking for original, situated inquiry — the underexplored gaps and newly emerging tensions that only become visible from inside the field and built expertise.
At a glance 👀
- Award: USD 5,000 per report (fixed)
- Format: short exploratory report, up to 10 pages + a summary post for our website
- Audience: funders, practitioners, and policy actors — not only academic readers
- Eligibility: individuals, affiliated researchers, practitioners; single or co-authored
- Proposals due: Monday, 7 September 2026
The full call (see: https://infrastructureinsights.fund/#open-call) proposes a range across digital sovereignty and fragmentation, public funding and institutional design, Global Majority perspectives and asymmetries, knowledge and research infrastructure, the boundaries of openness, ecosystem architecture as public policy, and the open infrastructure beneath AI automation. These are prompts, not a closed list — you're welcome to define your own question. Please read the full RFP (including the AI policy) before applying: the core question and its framing must originate with you.
Apply here: https://fordfoundation.forms.fm/2026-limited-rfp-digital-infrastructure-insights-fund-2
Looking back: The D//F 2018–2026
Open digital infrastructure is now core and center of academic and policy debate. Since the Fund was created in 2018 — in the wake of Heartbleed, by the Ford and Sloan Foundations — the conversation around ODI has shifted and grown more complex. The question is no longer whether open digital infrastructure matters, or what it entails, but how it should be governed, financed, secured, and held accountable in the public interest.
Since 2018, D//F has worked to map, explain, and help sustain the often-invisible foundations our shared digital life depends on. Over time, new support systems have emerged around this work: a Great Leap Forward from the Roads & Bridges report, which conducted a first lay of the land and made invisible infrastructure legible. Initiatives like the Sovereign Tech Fund, Invest in Open Infrastructure, and Open Technology Research point to a field that is maturing.
The Fund's original questions remain valid, but are easier to place now: criticality can be read through dependencies and institutional reliance; sustainability is a matter of governance, labor, and incentives rather than "goodwill"; and public funding has become a serious — if still incomplete counterpart to philanthropy.
D//F's afterlife. As new actors entered the field, many of them trusted ecosystem partners, the Fund's original mission evolved — and as this phase closes, our work continues in a different form. Going forward, D//F will live on as a network: an independent knowledge partner and strategic advisor to funders, commercial actors, researchers, and public-interest institutions investing in open infrastructure, helping identify how to support open technologies and the people behind the code better. Partners can commission reports — as prototyped here — and expand on the knowledge grantees helped surface about building, deploying, governing, and securing open digital infrastructure.
I — and the circle of funders — are so happy to see how far this has come, and it's been a real honour to bring about change in the ecosystem together with all of you. This is, by far, not the end. Thank you, all cohorts and observers, for your deep expertise, excellence, and the fun along the way. The legacy is here.
New reports (Cohorts 3 & 4)
🚨 New report I — What "public" really means in Digital Public Infrastructure
A new D//F report from Internet Research Lab examines Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — an ecosystem often conflated with open digital infrastructure, but far more complex. The team takes the principles DPI is said to embody — openness, participatory governance, security, privacy — and tests them against how six Indian systems actually operate: FASTag, Aadhaar eKYC, DigiLocker, Account Aggregator, Bharat Connect, and UPI.
The catch the report foregrounds: most of those principles were articulated after the systems were built, and retrospectively labelled DPI. The gap between promise and practice is where the report centers its attention. Four patterns recur:
- Delegation without accountability: operational and sometimes regulatory functions are handed to private entities insulated from public scrutiny. Half the systems run through a bank-owned non-profit that disputes being subject to RTI — while processing most of India's digital payments on public subsidies.
- Openness as narrative arbitrage: source code is largely closed, once-public API specs have been withdrawn, and "open" APIs are open only to licensed incumbents. DPI systems borrow the credibility of open source for permissioned infrastructure where auditability and the right to fork don't apply.
- Compounded privacy harm: the systems bind behaviour to government IDs, link previously siloed activity, and pool it in centralised repositories reachable by the state under broad exemptions. The architecture for population-scale profiling already exists and is documented in use.
- Narrow security perimeters: operators draw the boundary at the core and disclaim the third-party integrators through whom most breaches occur — while researchers reporting flaws have faced legal threats.
The through-line: "public" is doing very little work in "digital public infrastructure" here. No system offers an ongoing avenue for public participation, and the authors argue the form DPI takes is fundamentally political, not technical. The team has built a full website with an interactive scorecard and will publish an essay series with DPI experts over the coming month.
Project page: infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/dpi-privacy · Report and scorecard: irl.works/dpi
🚨 New report II — Building Sustainable Connectivity: FOSS for community-based internet providers
Nathalia Foditsch and Guilherme Flynn Paciornik at Connect Humanity ask a deceptively simple question: how does the deployment of FOSS in (Brazilian) ISP stacks relate to the accessibility, affordability, and sustainability of the internet those providers deliver — especially for underserved communities?
The central finding: open source is the foundation of Brazil's small-ISP sector — near-universal, and until now surprisingly unmeasured. Large operators routinely overlook regions they consider too remote or too poor to be profitable; more than 11,000 small ISPs fill that gap, largely running open technology while struggling for capital and long-term viability. Digital inclusion in Brazil would likely have been impossible without FOSS.
Where FOSS holds and where it breaks:
- Adoption is solved at the network layer but stuck at the business layer, where ERP and billing stay proprietary and concentrated.
- Underneath sits an institutional gap: to the authors' knowledge, no central actor owns or sustains business-FOSS solutions — which the report shows are critical infrastructure for connectivity.
- There's no centralized, up-to-date documentation (especially in Portuguese), no consolidated reference stack, and limited technical support. Providers sometimes fall back on cracked software because the compliant commercial option is unaffordable and the compliant open option isn't packaged well enough to adopt.
- Past efforts (open-source ERP, DANOS, the LibreRouter push) failed through attrition or regulatory friction — not technical shortfall.
The finding that carries beyond Brazil: the bottleneck in FOSS has moved from whether the free code exists to who is resourced to sustain it. This is exactly the gap D//F exists to make visible. The report turns the observation into concrete, sector-specific evidence — and offers a ready-to-use open-source stack for small ISPs (Appendix 1) plus recommendations for the institutional support to sustain it.
Project page: infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/isp-oss
🚨 New report III — "What comes after FOSS?"
John D. Boy finalises his Cohort 3 project — a corrective rather than a manifesto, retiring the assumption that peer production in FOSS is inherently democratizing, without romanticizing what replaces it. The argument stands on a conceptual tripod:
- Recursive deskilling — as Big Tech has come to dominate the tools, stacks, and standards developers rely on (GitHub, NPM, cloud, and now coding agents), control over the labour process has eroded, producing bloat, burnout, and a loss of craft that reaches even DIY technologists.
- Legitimation crisis — FOSS's implicit liberalism, its faith in licenses as regulation and deliberation as decision-making, has repeatedly failed to resolve conflicts around inclusivity, governance, and maintenance. Boy reads this through the FSF's collapse in credibility and recent license proliferation.
- Learning blockages — norms inherited from hacker culture (meritocracy, "keep politics out of software") actively obstruct the collective learning needed to move on.
The empirical heart is a November 2025 workshop at NIAS in Amsterdam — "Code as Critique: Relearning Technical Practice in the Ruins of Big Tech" — bringing together three communities of practice: permacomputing, server collectives, and decentralized networking. These are sites where technologists relearn technical practice "from the inside," drawing governance inspiration from community gardens, libraries, and mutual aid rather than the FSF/OSI/SFC lineage.
Project page: infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/what-comes-after-foss
🚨 New report IV — Funding the Web: a covenant for browsers, search, and people
New work exploring a problem that impacts the entire web. Browsers and mobile OSs are complex and expensive, yet we universally get them free — because they're funded by a levy on search engines. The sums are huge (Apple alone takes over $20bn/year). The trouble is that the levy system is privately governed and has severe consequences: it maintains an artificial search monopoly, and it defunds the wider web — especially the media — by letting the dominant search engine charge inflated ad prices and capture a disproportionate share of web marketing. Browser vendors benefit from a system they help sustain.
The report documents several harms and offers a range of solutions. The headline proposal is the Web Infrastructure Search Endowment (WISE): keep the levy that funds browsers, but replace its governance so it works for everyone. Feasibility precedent comes from an unlikely place — SWIFT, the cooperative of 10,000 banks that has governed complex, critical, transnational financial infrastructure for 50 years. The Digital Markets Act, and specifically its choice-screen provisions, offers a path to enforcement: delegate the choice-screen system to a standards process, and make WISE participation an eligibility criterion. The report includes a demo of a better choice screen.
Project page: infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/browser-funding · Report site: ftw.fund
🚨 New report V — Building Trust through Values (MoCHI)
Congratulations to the team at Invest in Open Infrastructure on their MoCHI findings. The starting question: how applicable and useful are community health frameworks and metrics in incentivizing investment in and adoption of open infrastructure for research?
After a year of research with providers, funders, and adopters, the answer is that good evaluation requires more than a checklist — it needs tools to navigate genuine trade-offs between affordability and longevity, innovation and stability, aspirational values and real constraints. MoCHI identified 11 themes stakeholders consistently rely on, from fiscal security and transparent governance to community belonging and data sovereignty — each mattering, but not equally, not always, and not to everyone the same way. The team is sharing everything: themes, tensions, workshop insights, and implications for tools like Infra Finder.
Project page: infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/oss-research-software
🚨 New report VI — The DIGITCORE Toolkit
Congratulations to Shannon Dosemagen and the team on releasing the Digital Toolkit for Collaborative Environmental Research (DIGITCORE). Openness is often treated as an inherent good — but how is "open" actually experienced by frontline communities participating in environmental research?
The toolkit answers by mapping themes and patterns common across collaborative environmental research, then linking them to solutions and resources. It's designed to help community-based organizations, researchers, open-source developers, funders, and research institutions make decisions about the tools, interactions, and research designs that best support collaboration — and you can save, share, and download the parts most relevant to you via the "carrier bag" feature.
Project page: infrastructureinsights.fund/projects/beyond-openness-toward-the-common
Looking ahead
More reports are coming over the next few weeks, and a second newsletter in early October will cover the wind-down of active funding in full. This is just the beginning of D//F's afterlife as a network — surfacing what's on the horizon for the ecosystems now coming of age, .
Questions, remarks? As always, don't hesitate to reach out.
With love,
Katharina for the
D//F — Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund