Thank you so much.
Hi everyone.
My name is Emmie Tang.
I'm the Engagement Lead at Invest in Open Infrastructure.
And my name is Chris Wu.
I am Product Lead at Invest in Open Infrastructure.
And today we're here to introduce InfraFinder.
But before that, if I can just take a minute to introduce what Invest in Open Infrastructure is.
We're a non-profit initiative.
We work to increase the investment in the adoption of open infrastructure
to further the equitable access and participation in research.
We do this in a couple of ways.
We build tools and recommendations based on our research and evidence
to help decision makers and funders make informed decisions about their investment into open infrastructure.
We also catalyze investment into the space by running funding pilots.
Well, this looks like in practice for us.
Our work currently is centered around three core programs that you can see on the screen here.
We are catalyzing investment into the space.
As I said, running a couple of funding pilots at the moment to look at how we can diversify the funding mechanisms and players
into getting them to invest more into open infrastructure
and to build towards a healthy, resilient and sustainable future for research and scholarship.
We also partner directly with open infrastructure service providers and funders and adopters
to provide tailored recommendations and engagement based on our research.
And last but not least, we have something called the Data Room,
which is all about tools, actionable tools and recommendations that, again, institutions and funders can use
to help guide their investment into open infrastructure.
An Infra Finder that we're about to share with you is part of the Data Room.
So, Infra Finder, why are we building it? What is the problem that we see?
So, we know that open infrastructure can really advance open values because it's customizable
and it can be adapted as the community's needs grow.
And we also know that it is recognized to be important by international policies and recommendations
like the UNESCO Open Science recommendations and also in the US, for example,
the Nelson Memo on open access publishing and infrastructure for that as well.
So, the question is then for us, how can we increase effectively the adoption of open infrastructure?
To start thinking about this problem and this question,
we decided to first look at who we want to solve this problem for.
And so, we chose the target audience of institutional decision makers.
So, these could be libraries who are choosing to adopt a certain repository service.
It could be library publishing teams who are choosing a publishing software.
We choose to work with this audience because we want to really make an impact at scale.
So, institutional level adoption of infrastructure means that all the researchers within that institution
is then using that open infrastructure.
And we also have had long-standing relationships with institutional decision makers.
They are some of the strongest supporters of our work and we've had years of engagement with them
so we do understand them a little bit better.
So, that's where we're starting at with Infra Finder.
To start understanding how our audience see the problem,
we took months to do user research and focus groups and interviews to try and understand
what is going on in their heads, what is going on around them as they make decisions
around adopting infrastructure like repositories and publishing software.
And we find that actually finding the right infrastructure for them is a really, really hard and slow process.
They need a lot of information, information related to costs, for example,
how much money will they take them, how much staff time will they take their team
to be able to maintain the infrastructure, to upgrade the infrastructure in the short, medium and long term.
They are also trying to risk the purchase so that they don't want to understand
if the infrastructure service is going to be maintained and continue to be in existence
for a foreseeable future because you probably don't want to buy infrastructure that will stop existing tomorrow.
They also want to see if the infrastructure will fit into all the other things that they've already got in place
within their own institution and libraries.
And last but not least, there are some institutions who are thinking about how can we use this infrastructure
decision to advance their institutional vision for openness.
So what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of considerations and every single institution we spoke with
had a different priority in mind. They all rank those differently.
The information, but for everyone, the information is scattered on the Internet
and it's very hard to piece together the information that they need to compare different surfaces.
And also it's just really, really time consuming.
It's easy, someone's months of work to be able to pull this information together
to put it into a comparable form to show it to their management
and to convince them that they are making the right decision.
So this is the problem that we've defined for this first release of Infrafinder
and the one that we're trying to address right now.
And I hand over to Chris to elaborate what we've built.
Thank you, Amy.
Okay.
Let's see if this works.
All right, so thank you for your attention so far.
It's my pleasure to introduce what we're calling Infrafinder to you.
This tool is meant to help folks navigate the complex landscape of infrastructure services and standards
that enable open research and scholarship.
So what we wanted to present to you folks in this first iteration was up-to-date verified information
about various infrastructures.
We also wanted to make sure that the key information that they had told us
that they were really looking for, that pragmatic information we'd shown you on an earlier slide,
was in one place.
And then also we wanted to provide that easy to use comparison view.
So I'm going to show you designs and the prototype.
Right now we're still in progress, so this isn't quite live yet, and it's a little bit buggy.
Subject change, but it is still my pleasure to show you this preview.
So this is an example of a page that we're calling the Individual Provider Service Page.
So an individual provider is invited to give us information that we are presenting in this way.
You can see it allows the provider to show us mission, their key achievements, technical attributes,
and as well as information about community engagement, which is so important to the open vision.
They can also tell us about policies that they have, as well as additional information about the organization itself,
and at the very end they can also describe their own funding needs.
So this is the Individual Provider Page.
We have worked, we invited 87 partners to work with us, and we received responses from 57, 56, yeah, 56 or 57 of them.
So we've already collected this data that is shown, this will be presented when people first come to InfraViner to be able to see what's here.
We also have developed a nurturing process that will allow this listing to grow over time
and also will be doing our verification process as well, checking against publicly available records where they are available
to ensure that the information is both up to date as well as verified.
And in the end, users, when they go to the site, will be able to pick services.
We're choosing to give people the option to choose three at a time, because three is a good number to compare against.
So this is the comparison page, and it kind of boils down all of this information into a way that people can see this high level info side by side
so that, for example, they can see, is there an open product roadmap of the services that they've chosen, which groups have them, and which groups do not.
So again, high level overview, but I hope that this gives you a taste of what it is that we have in mind.
We are aiming to, so most of you who are working here on what we would think of as the provider side.
So what's in it for you? If you are interested, being part of InfraViner allows you to showcase your key achievements and highlight your funding needs.
In addition, you'll be able to reach more potential adopters as well as funders.
And finally, you can learn from and connect with other infrastructure services.
In fact, when we sent out our initial invitation of those providers who chose to respond to us, they actually were telling us as well that in seeing and hearing about what kinds of information users were looking for,
it kind of sparked this idea that maybe they themselves would want to start to work on some of the things that they had put off, knowing that potential users were in fact looking for that info.
So you can, in fact, complete our expression of interest form if you meet our criteria.
You can add your service to InfraViner by going to this URL or the QR code.
I'll give you a minute for those of you who've got your phones out.
Okay.
And yeah, in terms of next steps, this is a beginning.
When we release this, it's not the final product, it's not the end of the conversation.
We are aiming to release in a few months' time, and we'd love to start and continue the conversation from here.
So one of the things that we've been wrestling with with regard to this is how to ask about interoperability.
So as we mentioned earlier, one of the things that we discovered users wanted to know is, like, does your thing work with our situation?
Most people would call this interoperability, but not everyone understands interoperability in the same way.
So I'd love, Emmy and I would love to talk with you about, like, how we can ask the question about interoperability in a way where we can collect data that kind of essentially, like, helps us understand,
you know, understand how you think about it in the context of how users think about it and collect that data in a way that we can then standardize.
So yeah, so users want to know if your technology will work with the other things that they have running and the answer isn't always, we'll just use our API is what we've discovered.
So please come and talk with us afterward.
We're going to be here for the rest of the day and as well as tomorrow.
So anyway, I'd like to thank you again for your time and you can sign up for our newsletter for updates about all of the work that Iowa is doing as well as the launch notice for Infra Finder.
And should you want to email us, you can reach us at infra-finder at investingopen.org. Thank you.