ICTworks

Open Digital Infrastructure (ODI) represents the set of Open Source code, institutional settings, technical standards, and knowledge assets that support software technologies like software libraries, compilers, or communication- and network protocols.

Open Digital Infrastructure are created by individuals, in volunteer communities, in research institutions, and corporate environments. Together, they form a foundation of free and public code that is designed to solve common challenges- firstly, in programming, but when applied, also to provide a multitude of digital core functions for society.

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Everything in our modern society, from social services and hospitals to banks and collaborative research depends on Open Digital Infrastructure that provides essential functions for society by reducing the cost of establishing new businesses, supporting data-driven discovery across research disciplines, and granting access to crucial technical innovations like encryption that would otherwise be too expensive.

$100,000 Open Digital Infrastructure Program Grants

The 2024 Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund RFP will support proposals addressing a range of issues and different scopes with 7-10 grants up to $100k for 6 – 12 months projects. The individual size of the grant will be negotiated post-selection.

The Ford Foundation is interested in these core areas of research:

• Boundaries of Openness: Normative & Ideological Foundations, political economies, legal loopholes & other challenges in FOSS (Infrastructure)
• ODI as accelerator: Role & adoption in Knowledge Dissemination and Innovation from Basic Research to Field Work in academia, factories and beyond
• Building “Cyber Resilience” from Weekend Projects to Critical Infrastructures: DevOps, Consolidation, Regulation, (sociotechnical construction of) supply chains
• Group- and Power- Dynamics impacting the development of communities, artifacts, and policy in FOSS
• ODI and its intersections with materiality, technical standards, hardware, coding practices, automation and AI, data pipelines, connectivity …
• Geopolitics, Policy Frameworks, Markets, Law: landscapes shaping the trajectory and long-term sustainability of ODI
• The Human Infrastructure in Digital Infrastructure: Global Shifts, Demographics and other opportunities (or impediments) of building and maintaining software and communities
• Social, Material, Environmental, Temporal (…) Dimensions of Sustainability (including observations on practices of Sustenance & Sunsetting in infrastructural FOSS-Software Lifecycles)
• History & Ontologies: Learning from Public Works and other (historic) infrastructure for the custody and care of ODI, bridging and discussing paradigms from open innovation to digital public goods
•  Models & Metrics: Defining and demonstrating Health, Risk, Security and more

The Foundation is also soliciting the implementation of (small-scale) prototypes like frameworks, policy work or strategic communications that help achieve more sustainable practices in the communities providing and deploying ODI components.

Apply Now! Deadline is June 2, 2024

More Funding Opportunities

Do you want to win USAID RFP funding for humanitarian aid projects? Get startup investments for a technology business? Or learn how to win more contracts? Then please sign up now to get our email updates. We are constantly publishing new funding opportunities like these:

• Apply Now: €300,000 for Data-Driven Digital Social Innovations in Africa
• Apply Now: $850,000 for Women’s Digital Economic Empowerment Research
• Apply Now: $500,000 Research Grants to Improve the Internet