Group items tagged

ongoing engineering improvements, product development, design and research, and legal support.

Free and public code grew in direct response to the perceived failings of expensive, proprietary commercial software. As a result, the heart of the problem with digital infrastructure is also part of what makes it so rich with potential: It is not centralized. There is no one person or entity deciding what’s needed and what’s not. There is also no one overseeing how digital infrastructure is implemented. And because the community of volunteers developing this infrastructure has a complicated relationship with what might be seen as a more traditional, or official, way of doing things, few digital infrastructure projects have a clear business model or source of revenue. Even projects that have grown to be used by millions of people tend to lack a cohesive structure and plan for sustaining the technology’s long-term development.

We need to start by educating people who are in positions to provide support. Many of them—from start-up engineers to government officials—don’t know enough about how digital infrastructure functions and what it requires, or are under the perception that public software doesn’t need support.