Grant Proposal: Building Resilient Infrastructure through Dialogue, Growth, and Exchange (BRIDGE)

Code for Science & Society, Inc. R250422883 Public Knowledge Grantee Overview Invest in Open Infrastructure IOI was founded on the premise that new approaches were needed to fund, scale, and sustain the underlying open technologies that research relies on. We drive informed, strategic, and coordinated investment in and adoption of open infrastructure. We provide targeted, evidence-based guidance and strategic support to infrastructure providers, institutions, and funders of open infrastructure. Our guidance is honed and refined through extensive research and consultations with infrastructure providers, librarians and library workers, publishers, technologists, community-network leaders of consortia and research networks, research institutions, funders, and research practitioners. Grant Summary/Abstract In the proposal, “Building Resilient Infrastructure through Dialogue, Growth, and Exchange BRIDGEˮ, Code for Science & Society, the fiscal sponsor of IOI, requests on behalf of IOI $750,000 USD for a 30-month project to develop and pilot a blended cohort and partnership model to bridge divides between different types of organizations involved in knowledge stewardship and usage. This model is intended to test new approaches for IOI to directly support open infrastructure organizations in developing sustainable revenue streams and business models that move beyond heavy reliance on grants while facilitating collaboration between academic institutions, nonprofits, and commercial organizations to create mutually beneficial partnerships. This approach tests both a service model for a set of open infrastructures to diversify their funding and explore business models and frameworks that reduce their financial risk, while also cultivating a “safe spaceˮ for cross-sector dialogue and action, with the intention of bringing more diverse funder types (including commercial organizations) to the table. As described in detail below, IOI has identified a critical, shared area of need between commercial organizations, funders, and open infrastructure providers: how best to scaffold and fund the knowledge ecosystem to meet the increasing demand for and usage of curated collections as crucial data sources. Over the project period, we will build and share a foundational knowledge base of case studies, cross-sector partnership models, and reciprocal business strategies supporting “open,ˮ using these to both inspire and prompt multi-sector collaboration and problem solving (e.g., between commercial, nonprofit, academic, and government stakeholders). The IOI team will serve as trusted facilitators and mediators, using our deep knowledge and extended relationships across this often-divided set of stakeholder groups to plan and implement safe spaces in which their interaction, engagement, alignment, and eventually, partnerships can flourish. The project will yield practical partnership models designed to help resolve multi-stakeholder challenges, focusing specifically on how to calibrate business models to meet the changes in supply of and demand for open knowledge collections to better match commercial demand while ensuring mutual benefit across sectors. Goals The projectʼs primary goals are to develop and demonstrate disciplined strategic frameworks for market engagement and partnership development that radically improve the knowledge ecosystemʼs health and sustainability as it adapts to new types of users, demand, and activities (e.g., LLM training). Using IOIʼs relationships, expertise, facilitation skills, and existing service-delivery offerings, we will partner with stakeholders across the nonprofit, public, commercial, and private investment spheres, including open infrastructures, knowledge institutions, publishers and technology organizations, and funders, to design and demonstrate approaches to improving the viability of open collections in a changing marketplace, while preserving the open principles and community values that make open infrastructure unique. We highlight the following goals as especially relevant for the aims of this grant. 1 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 ● Establish foundational knowledge base of cross-sector partnership and business strategies supporting “open,ˮ creating a reference framework for stakeholder engagement throughout the project. This includes collaborative models (co-investments, resource sharing, hosting relationships) and activities (host transition, acquisition, deacquisition, sunsetting, licensing changes) across specific business forms (not-for-profit, for-profit, cooperative, hybrid). ● Test IOIʼs market positioning and service demand via stakeholder interviews, needs analysis, and competitive landscape review, to further explore the value proposition for engaging IOIʼs knowledge, relationships, and research for this sort of facilitated problem solving and partnership building. We will build out this offering as a complement to and reinforcement of our existing business intelligence and systems-level work, including Infra Finder and State of Open Infrastructure. ● Create facilitated stakeholder engagement spaces. Operationalize IOI's trusted intermediary role by designing and facilitating structured dialogues where diverse stakeholders (including but not limited to commercial, academic, nonprofit, and investment entities) can safely explore values alignment, investment expectations, and sustainable partnership models for open infrastructure. ● Develop and test collaborative solutions. Co-create practical partnership models that address real stakeholder needs, focusing specifically on balancing the supply of open knowledge collections with commercial demand while ensuring mutual benefit across sectors. ● Activate sustainable multi-stakeholder partnerships. Facilitate the formation of actionable partnerships spanning commercial, nonprofit, and investment sectors, testing collaboration models that deliver measurable value and demonstrate scalable approaches to open infrastructure sustainability. ● Strengthen IOIʼs organizational capacity and sustainability. Build IOI's market position as the leading facilitator of complex stakeholder dynamics in open infrastructure while developing sustainable revenue streams that support organizational independence and growth. ● Advance IOIʼs research and intelligence capabilities. Leverage partnership-facilitation work as a research opportunity to deepen understanding of stakeholder decision-making, partnership dynamics, and collaboration models, strengthening IOI's analytical offerings and market intelligence. This work will help to exemplify and solidify IOIʼs positioning as a highly trusted organization operating in an inherently uncomfortable, tension-filled space between sectors to forge solutions that work well at the system level and benefit all stakeholder types and roles. We have seen stakeholders across the open infrastructure ecosystem, from community-driven projects to institutional funders to private sector organizations, try to communicate their distinctive needs, pressures, and concerns on sector-wide challenges, but often without the right intermediary to create and nurture a productive space for problem-solving and facilitate meaningful dialogue and sustainable solutions. Through our training and cross-sector/partnership facilitation work, we will demonstrate our ability to bridge gaps that have hindered collaboration and experimentation between and across different business instantiations and sector identities. Boundaries can serve as barriers or junctures, and we will recognize the former while encouraging the latter. We see two intersecting prongs of our work – providing direct support to infrastructures and engaging new sources and models of funding and partnership – as critical for achieving our mission and uniquely meeting the current moment. Through IOIʼs market intelligence research and dedicated efforts to increase commercial investment in open infrastructure, we have learned firsthand the need for business motivations and value to be aligned for meaningful investment and collaboration to occur. We have also seen early signals that IOI would be welcomed as a neutral facilitator, creating safe spaces where commercial organizations, funders, and open infrastructure providers can explore partnership opportunities while mitigating competitive concerns. This approach helps us pilot this convening role and test whether there is a demand for this type of trusted intermediary function for the broader open infrastructure ecosystem as one of IOIʼs core offerings. From challenge to opportunity: designing new models for rapidly changing digital landscapes 2 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 We recognize there are a number of use cases and constellations of stakeholders that could be fruitful for IOI to explore, and over the past six months we have conducted preliminary research on a series of potential candidates for these models. IOI has also conducted market positioning research to assess the need and appetite for more cross-sector dialogue and funding exploration as part of IOIʼs work to model a path towards sustainability, growing our efforts to activate and deepen engagement with a broader range of funding stakeholders, while serving as an intermediary and trusted broker for driving meaningful development of investment and adoption pathways for open infrastructures1. We propose exploring targeted scoping around a specific use case: business and partnership opportunities stemming from the increasing demand for and usage of curated collections as crucial data sources. This is an area where we have seen strong initial signs of investment by both public and private funding sources; new expressions of needs from commercial players, infrastructures, and collections stewards; increasing demand for both assets and resources; and a distinct opportunity to explore new product and financial models for open infrastructures and critical knowledge collections. We have observed that organizations maintaining open knowledge resources, such as arXiv, Knowledge Commons, and the Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ, face sustainability challenges as the demand for these collections shifts from individual item usage to full corpus mining (e.g., from artificial intelligence AI and machine learning models). These organizations typically rely on academic, philanthropic, and government funding but their resources have become valuable to systems that operate at larger scales in commercial and nonprofit organizations, thereby creating a mismatch between funding models and current usage patterns. Over recent months, we have been brought into conversations with library leaders, organisations, infrastructures and commercial players that are navigating these issues in a variety of ways, including Harvardʼs Institutional Data Initiative, the development of the Public Interest Corpus by Northeastern University Library and Author Alliance, efforts across seven New York State institutions in the development of Empire AI, as well as infrastructure organisations and collections such as arXiv, Confederation of Open Access Repositories COAR, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Knowledge Commons, DOAJ and more. We have also observed the development of models such as Wikimedia Enterprise over recent years, created as an enterprise API offering stemming from funding efforts for Wikimediaʼs endowment, designed in concert with major technology companies to provide ways to financially support Wikipedia and the knowledge projects via mechanisms more aligned with their business interests. Each of these efforts are exploring ways to make digital collections – and in some cases, their underlying platforms – available and more resilient to meet the increased data collection traffic, including from scrapers and bots. Some entities are proactively thinking about how to design product-level offerings to broker commercial and nonprofit support from the outset, but most are continuing to actively seek ever-diminishing philanthropic and institutional support via more conventional approaches to funding project-based efforts. We also have heard directly from commercial publishers such as Wiley, Springer Nature, Emerald Publishing, as well as technology companies and tech-led-investors including Digital Science, Microsoft, OpenAI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Astera Institute, about their heightened demand for trusted, validated, knowledge collections that can fuel their internal development of models and products to drive forward their businesses. We see initial signals of a unique intersection of demand for data and content collections and investment as a fruitful ground for exploration – with commercial investments of over $10M in Harvardʼs Institutional Data Initiative, $60K to COARʼs AI working group, and countless content deals by leading publishers over the past few years. 1 Recent market positioning research conducted by Delta Think has surfaced this need as a repeated theme and opportunity for IOI to pursue. 3 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 These individual arrangements and projects are promising; IOI seeks to build on them, encouraging a widespread multi-stakeholder engagement between collection stewards seeking ways to recalibrate their business models and industry players who want to broaden their networks and who need clearer pathways for productive collaboration with open infrastructures at scale. Working together, these groups could demonstrate a mutually beneficial pathway forward, through structured collaboration that engenders trust across stakeholder communities. IOI will draw upon its unique knowledge and relationships across common sector divides, as well as its business strategy expertise, facilitation, and mediation skills, to help these groups engage in systems-based problem solving and partnership formation activities. Together, we will model how multi-stakeholder approaches can foster reciprocity and change, shifting energy from one-off instances towards system-level implementations. We recognize that these use cases are quickly developing, and we put this example forward as a pertinent place to mobilize fast action across a diverse set of stakeholders in order to model possible pathways forward that broker trust, advance our understanding of motivations, and explore public/private partnership and funding models for an emergent need. The multi-sector impact of our rapidly evolving AI landscape is a topic that players across the scholarly publishing, open science, and knowledge management fields are grappling with, making this an ideal time to test a new collaborative approach. Instead of just reacting to changes, we can help these organizations contribute to the way that changes unfold, ensuring that knowledge community stakeholders benefit from the AI revolution while preserving the open commons. Taking action: A disciplined, discovery-focused approach to ecosystem calibration This grant will provide IOI with the critical resources to take a disciplined, discovery-focused approach to understanding and servicing the ecosystem by building on market intelligence, testing our frameworks, and assessing their effectiveness through real application and structured evaluation. IOI will establish itself as an essential intermediary by operating in a risky space to broker solutions to shared problems that tangibly benefit all partners. As described in more detail below in “Activities,ˮ we will do this by: ● Strengthening organizational capacity for partnership using business disciplines2 and boundary-spanning methodologies3 to foster meaningful and lasting cross-sector collaborative practices across the knowledge collection and use spectrum. While this project will focus on particular shared challenges, IOIʼs facilitation will equip each stakeholder with new structures and processes that they can apply more broadly. The involved organizations will grow their relationships across sector boundaries, establish shared vocabularies, strengthen their understanding of sector/player constraints and needs, and gain experience applying business disciplines (e.g., establishing value propositions and gleaning ROI in multi-stakeholder environments. ● Stimulating and cultivating informal spaces of interaction in which deliberation, learning, and relationship building takes place. We will create structures to foster listening, exploring, and building trust and relationships across sectors that typically operate in silos or tension with each other. The safe spaces and partnership models we build will include all relevant and affected actors, explicitly developing with them a broadened conception of both the problems and potential joint solutions for supporting open collections and their growing uses (e.g., as data). We are uniquely positioned for this work in part by the diversity and 3 Boundary spanning is a framework through which facilitators use interpersonal skills and contextual knowledge to build processes that connect misaligned groups around their shared problem areas. Boundary spanning is used to help impacted stakeholders address system-wide challenges, first by improving communication and understanding across bounded groups, then by investigating and testing new forms of collaboration that are of mutual benefit to all of these groups, and finally by assessing (and calibrating over time) the impact of these new collaborations to ensure ongoing appropriate ROI for each stakeholder group. 2 Business discipline training includes sustainability modeling and business design, opportunity assessment and product-market fit analysis, and governance framework development - core IOI service offerings that strengthen financial models, identify value propositions, and guide organizations through strategic development lifecycles. 4 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 mix of players on IOIʼs own staff and the ways that we have internally worked to diffuse, mediate, and ultimately “boundary-spanˮ across our own sector-influenced identities. ● Investigating together how current system-wide economic changes impact each sector and what calibrations may be especially possible and/or challenging to pursue accordingly. This will enable the project to acknowledge and work with the real and ongoing tensions between sectors while also advancing industry-academic-public collaborations that utilize the unique needs and strengths of each sector in a critical moment. ● Establishing frameworks and methods that identify and address the diverse return on investment needs of all stakeholders. IOI will facilitate research and conversations to understand what different stakeholders value (including financial, sustainability, impact, community, and other forms of return and how these can be measured and demonstrated) and develop replicable models that can accommodate and support these varied definitions of success across different infrastructure domains and geographic regions. We will build new ways to exchange or pool resources for mutual benefit that can be explicitly tracked and measured over time. ● Documenting and sharing openly key outputs and findings from discovery (e.g. partnership models, cross-sector dialogue and engagement frameworks, stakeholder definitions and mappings). Outputs and resources will be made available for other organizations to adopt, multiplying the impact of this work well beyond the project. This project will focus on the underlying needs, motivations, and blockers that a variety of stakeholders encounter around a specific problem at the intersection of open infrastructure and commercial interest. It will mindfully build toward multi-stakeholder collaborations that demonstrate clear mutual value that is well defined and understood by all participating stakeholders, including collection stewards, open infrastructures, commercial organizations, service providers, and/or funders. We will also provide alternative framings and explore the structures and mechanisms used in other markets to advance experimentation with multi-stakeholder collaborations that support open infrastructure, including public-private partnerships, co-op models, shared investment frameworks, and business arrangements that couple commercial and nonprofit operations for reciprocal gain. This work builds on early successes and learnings in facilitating cross-sector dialogue and action, intentionally bringing more diverse stakeholder types to the table while creating a safe space for their focused, in-depth engagement around a particular use case. Activities 1 Foundation and participant recruitment Months 16, Nov 2025 - Apr 2026 ● Project launch Nov 2025 - Jan 2026 ○ Establish team workspaces, schedule, external communications plan, project infrastructure. Nov 2025 ○ Host an Internal kickoff meeting and external project announcement Nov 2025 ○ Expand IOIʼs cross-sector engagement through outreach, virtual and in-person meetings, and events. Nov 2025 - Mar 2026 ● Research Dec 2025 - Apr 2026 ○ Curated Collections as Data Sources Landscape Review: This arena is changing quickly; to inform our participant selection process and to ground our work in the latest developments, our team will undertake a brief, concentrated landscape review, focusing explicitly on changes in demand for and usage of curated collections (e.g., LLM and AI content harvesting and traffic). Dec 2025 - Mar 2026 ○ Cross-Sector Partnership and Business Strategies: Conduct research on cross-sector partnership and business strategies supporting “open,ˮ including collaborative models (co-investments, resource sharing, hosting relationships) and activities (host transition, 5 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 acquisition, deacquisition, sunsetting, licensing changes) across specific business forms (not-for-profit, for-profit, cooperative, hybrid). Dec 2025 - Mar 2026 ○ Publications. We will formally publish our research findings from both of these investigations in April 2026. ● Identify prospective participants for Discovery Phase work Feb - Apr 2026 ○ Identify prospective participants across sectors and roles who are 1 managing large, open, curated digital collections, 2 engaged in (or interested in) LLM processing and machine learning that draws upon open collections, 3 investing in AI and machine learning, 4 working to resolve technical, legal, and organizational challenges in AI training. We will use Infra Finder as a foundational resource to identify and assess infrastructure partners, as well as the results of our landscape review and IOIʼs internal database of companies and funders with giving patterns and/or interest in the use case as detailed above. Prospective participants may include such groups as HathiTrust, DOAJ, DOAB, COAR, Wikimedia, Internet Archive, openRxiv, arXiv, Palace Project, Institutional Data Initiative, Authorʼs Alliance, Taylor & Francis, Digital Science, Wiley, OpenAI, Omidyar Network. Feb-Mar 2026 ○ Prepare and host exploratory, sector-specific workshop sessions, based on our research Landscape Review and Cross-Sector Partnership and Business Strategies). These workshops will focus on opportunities for intersection and collaboration around the growing needs and demands for curated knowledge as data (e.g., LLM and AI content harvesting and traffic) for each sector and/or business form (industry, academic, not-for-profit). We will use these sessions to vet some of our potential participants, test findings to date, and explore sector-based language gaps and assumptions. Note, these will not be cross-sector groupings at this stage, but single-sector workshops. Mar - Apr 2026 ○ Conduct initial stakeholder mapping and readiness assessments for all prospective participants. Mar - Apr 2026 ○ Solidify, invite, and confirm an initial roster of 1520 participants that we will engage in the Discovery phase (below). Apr 2026 Deliverables: ● Project launch materials ● Workshops (one for each sector) ● Published Open Reports - 1 Curated Collections as Data Sources Landscape Review, 2 Cross-sector Partnership and Business Strategies ● 1520 confirmed participants for Discovery Phase 2 Discovery Months 718, May 2026 - Apr 2027 Building trust between disparate groups, especially those with a history of active distrust and frustration, requires time and careful, slow engagement. Our discovery process will follow a trust-building progression: beginning with individual conversations/engagements between each participant and IOIʼs team, then small “affinity groupsˮ (based on shared organization type, sector, function, or other designation), and finally with carefully constituted “constellation groupsˮ (intentional cross-sector mixes). ● 11 conversations May - Aug 2026 ○ Develop 11 conversation protocols May 2026 ○ Engage in information gathering, vetting, and trust-building process June-Jul 2026 ■ Conduct info gathering calls with each committed participant 11s, learning from their perspectives and gauging their fitness and willingness for the cross-sector work ahead. ○ Synthesize learnings to inform affinity group formation and identify emerging themes. Aug 2026 ● Affinity group series (based on existing similarities like type, sector, function) Sept - Dec 2026 6 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 ○ Form affinity groups to create “safe spacesˮ for like-minded participants (e.g., functional areas like “collections managersˮ or “AI investorsˮ or sectors like “academicˮ or “industryˮ). Each participant will be part of several affinity groups over the Fall 2026 series. Sept 2026 ○ Develop affinity group series agendas, meeting norms, and runs-of-show. Sept 2026 ○ Host affinity groups in which we actively explore affinity-group-specific perspectives on partnership challenges using “boundary spanningˮ methodology.4 Sept-Dec 2026 ○ Produce internal white paper synthesizing findings, barriers, and intersections between affinities, including shared vocabulary of terms with different meanings across groups. Nov-Dec 2026 ● Constellation group series (based on explicitly bridging affinities in each constellation) Dec 2026 - Apr 2027 ○ Using learnings from affinity group meetings, form mixed-stakeholder constellation groups that bridge participants from different affinity groups. Each participant will be part of several constellations over the Spring 2027 series. Dec 2026 ○ Develop constellation series agendas, meeting norms, and runs-of-show. Jan 2027 ○ Schedule and host constellation groups (bridging across and intermingling participants from different affinity groups; facilitating cross-sector dialogue, building on established trust and shared vocabulary, and beginning to discuss problems and potential partnership-based solutions). Feb-Apr 2027 ○ Produce internal white paper synthesizing constellation-group learnings, including the set of topics identified that stakeholders have indicated strong interest in addressing together. This will provide the foundation for the Sandbox development in the Collaboration development and testing phase. ○ Publish an open report documenting our boundary-spanning progression methodology and findings. Apr 2027 Deliverables: ● Internal synthesis white paper ● Affinity group and constellation mapping results, meeting agendas and materials ● Open Report on Boundary Spanning Methodology and Findings 3 Collaboration development and testing Months 1924, May 2027 - Oct 2027 ● Sandbox topic development May - Jun 2027 ○ Select and formalize “sandboxˮ topics and methods showing high cross-sector interest and potential for actionable outcomes. May 2027 ○ Develop preliminary frameworks for sector-specific investment mechanisms, shared funding agreements, policy guidelines, or recognition systems. May-Jun 2027 ○ Create draft templates and implementation guidelines for each selected topic. May-Jun 2027 ● Workshops May - Oct 2027 ○ Manage event logistics, including scheduling, location, transportation, meeting space, equipment, event communications, food. May-July 2027 ○ Share topics, frameworks, and templates with participants. Jul 2027 ○ Host in-person working sessions bringing together constellation participants in which we establish zones of safety and reciprocity, facilitating participants to engage with challenging problem areas, co-developing, drafting and refining specific revenue-sharing models, licensing frameworks, and partnership agreements, with each participant leaving with at least three actionable opportunities. Aug-Sept 2027 4 E.g., initial affinity group conversations will initially focus explicitly on defining one stakeholder typeʼs perspective and how/whether it puts them potentially at odds with other stakeholder groups. We want to explore biases in these safe spaces in order to learn where the barriers and potential junctures are between each stakeholder affinity before we strategize and explore ways to build bridges across them. 7 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 ○ Generate and support at least 12 pilots in which sets of participants will actively advance the models they have explored and drafted together, taking these to key decision-makers in each organization for sign off and implementation. Aug-Oct 2027 ○ Develop and manage clear assessment frameworks and targets that show the different returns afforded to each sector and player as the partnership progresses. Aug-Oct 2027 Deliverables: ● Partnership model (tested and validated) ● Workshop documentation ● Pilot implementation case studies ● Assessment frameworks and targets 4 Project wrap up and evaluation Months 2530, Nov 2027 - Apr 2028 ● Assessment survey for participants. Nov-Dec 2027 ● Document validated partnership models with implementation templates and case studies. Dec 2027 ● Establish ongoing support mechanisms for successful pilot partnerships. Jan-Mar 2028 ● Document pathways for scaling successful models beyond initial participant organizations. Jan-Mar 2028 ● Finalize IOI's enhanced service delivery models based on project learnings and market validation. Jan-Mar 2028 ● Publish full-project methodology, findings, and recommendations. Mar-Apr 2028 ● Final communications, synthesizing all project findings, outputs, and accomplishments in a final IOI wrap-up post. Apr 2028 Deliverables: ● Project assessment ● Published full-project methodology, findings, and recommendations ● Service delivery models ● Final synthesis Roles Core staff engaged in this project are outlined below: ● Executive Director Kaitlin Thaney, 10% Responsibilities: Lead PI, oversee project strategy and budget; ensure completion of all activities and deliverables; manage relationships ● Director, Development Emma Green, 25% and Director, Programs Dr. Katherine Skinner, 25% Responsibilities: Co-PI, co-design and co-facilitate project work, including: engagement across sectors in relevant events; recruitment process, workshops; 11, affinity, and constellation calls; sandbox topic development; workshops; pilot implementations; and assessment frameworks; line manage project staff; co-create with Lippincott, Collister, and Wu all project white papers. ● Director, Finance & Operations Emmy Tsang, 5% Responsibilities: oversee budget, line manager for Operations Manager and Engagement & Communications Manager ● Senior Researcher Sarah Lippincott, 20%, Research Engagement Manager Lauren Collister, 20%, and Solutions Strategist Chrys Wu, 20% Responsibilities: conduct research on industry/commercial engagement with OI, including case studies on acquisition, deacquisition, release of proprietary software as open, etc.; co-conduct initial stakeholder mapping and readiness assessments; co-create with Green and Skinner all project white papers; co-produce with Green and Skinner workshop sessions; co-plan and help to facilitate 11, affinity, and constellation calls, sandbox topic development, workshops, pilot implementations. ● Engagement & Communications Manager Jerry Sellanga, 5% Responsibilities: external project announcements, management and final editing and production of all open reports and papers, newsletter management, regular blog/podcast series about the project. 8 Code for Science & Society, Inc. R-2504-22883 ● Operations Manager Madelyn Waterbury, 10% Responsibilities: Establish team workspaces, schedule, external communications plan, project timelines; Manage event logistics, including scheduling, location, transportation, meeting space, equipment, event communications, catering. Additional subject matter expertise will be leveraged via constellation group participant selection. Sustainability Through targeted business development and strategic presence at key industry events, IOI is expanding into new markets including publishers, nonprofit societies, and emerging philanthropies. This expansion follows a three-horizon framework balancing current operations, emerging opportunities, and long-term vision. The BRIDGE project represents a pivotal step in IOI's evolution toward comprehensive service delivery for open infrastructure sustainability. By developing cross-sector facilitation frameworks, we will strengthen our foundation as an essential intermediary organization—one that ensures long-term viability of mission-driven open infrastructures while navigating complex dynamics between nonprofit stewardship and commercial dependencies. This positions IOI to evolve beyond grant-dependent operations toward a hybrid model combining ecosystem stewardship with strategic investment, ensuring critical open infrastructure resources remain accessible for scholarship and society. Technology Not applicable. 9