The Illusion of Scarcity, the Power of Community, and the Future of Open Infrastructure
An in conversation post with Katherine Skinner
My connection with Katherine Skinner spans at least 15 years, though for much of that time, I admired her from a distance. I had heard of her accomplishments long before I had the opportunity to cross paths with her. It wasn’t until my former boss at Stanford, Tom Cramer, suggested we connect that the bridge was finally built. When I first started my current position, I found myself literally sifting through the history of her tenure at Emory while cleaning out old files, piecing together how she got her start.
As my own interest in open infrastructure has grown, I’ve had increasing opportunities to interact with Katherine, both personally and professionally. I sincerely appreciate her contributions to our community and, most recently, her work at Invest in Open Infrastructure—so much so that while preparing my recent keynote for iPRES, I made a point of citing her extensive work on community building. As part of that, I decided to reach out and interview her to learn more from her. I also thought it would be a great complement to the talk I was creating (and knew I would post for all of you). Throughout the interview, you’ll hear why Katherine has influenced my work. Which is to say, if you haven’t had the chance to engage with Katherine, you are in for a real treat.
In this conversation, we peel back the layers of “sustainability”—a buzzword we all use but rarely define with the rigor Katherine brings. We discuss the fragility of institutional support, the dangerous “anti-profit” bias in libraries, and why she believes the scarcity of funding in our field is actually an illusion. Katherine’s provides an unvarnished wisdom that I admire greatly. She is a truth-teller in a field that often prefers politeness, and as you’ll read, she’s done apologizing for it.
The Fragility of Institutions
We began by discussing the origins of Educopia and the MetaArchive Cooperative. Katherine’s experience in building these communities serves as a masterclass in risk management: she realized early on that even the most supportive institutions are subject to the whims of administrative turnover. That realization—that “permanent” is a myth—became the bedrock of her philosophy on infrastructure.
RM: I’m very curious about your writing on funding and sustainability. You’ve called it an “illusion” that there isn’t enough money to support open infrastructure. What lived experience led you to that conclusion?
KS: Sustainability, and fiscal sustainability specifically, was always on my mind. When I entered this field around 2000, my first projects focused on archives, OAI-PMH, and building federated collections. But the question that dogged me was: Then what? How do we make sure that these digital records persist?
By 2006, Martin Halbert—who was running library systems at Emory—came to me and said, “We need to found a non-profit.” At the time, we needed a neutral space for a digital preservation network we’d founded (MetaArchive) as well as other community activities hosted and facilitated by our team at Emory, but that we didn’t want to “own” or “control”; we believed these initiatives didn’t really belong to any one institution. We felt that associating with a single institution would be too much of a failure point.
At first, I tried to stand in the way. We were both working on our dissertations at the time and managing about $6 million in grants. I told Martin to go away until we turned in our dissertations. He said, “No, I don’t think we can wait.” So, 19 years ago, Martin talked me into it, and we founded Educopia.
Here’s the thing—and I think I can safely talk about this now—we had perfect support at Emory. I couldn’t have asked for any library to be a better home for multi-institutional collaborative work. But Martin’s point was that libraries are the custodians of long-term memory; we aren’t equipped to manage the business infrastructure needed to maintain it. Emory shouldn’t be in charge of the future of a digital preservation network. That is never going to be Emory’s aim, despite all the supporters we had in the university’s administration at the time. From the get-go, Educopia was a sustainability plan for many of the projects we were working on.
But within a year of founding Educopia, the whole system at Emory started to change, from the Provost down. We lost all of that support apparatus at once. The folks who came in were not nearly as enamored with what we were doing. In the end, Emory was the first one to drop out of MetaArchive.
So, not only did we create a map for fiscal sustainability and governance continuity, but it really, really came true that we needed Educopia for business infrastructure. It left a deep impression on me. You can’t take sustainability for granted. The fragility of the open infrastructure systems we build is often hinged on academic institutions. Some argue that because universities have lasted for centuries, they are a safe bet. But right now? Not a great bet. Not when fiscal models are being upended.
RM: That really speaks to the illusion of stability we often have. You mentioned earlier that there is enough money, but it’s not being used correctly. Can you expand on that?
KS: I started my “Emperor’s New Clothes” series privately in a notebook back in 2016. It was just all the things that I had heard through my project work that frustrated me.
While there has always been enough money in the system to create the open infrastructures we need, there hasn’t been enough to simply replicate the same functions everywhere. We don’t have the money for personality-driven projects, or for one little clique that wants to make it “their way,” so they fork off and do their own thing. The amount of money we’ve had in the system has sometimes let us do foolish things. We’ve had the freedom to do that—money from grants, as well as the volunteer time people had the bandwidth to provide.
Watching that evaporate... well, you gotta find a silver lining. It makes us realize that we’ve been in this age of experimentation, and that it’s been great. We’ve created standards and protocols. But now, we should make some choices. And let’s do that as a field. Let’s not have Funder X decide this program needs to go, while Funder Y pushes another one. We’ve got to find a better way to choose what we genuinely want to work with in the long term. Otherwise, we won’t have any open options because they can’t compete with proprietary solutions. And then we all lose.
Market Failures
Katherine is a self-described truth-teller, and nowhere was this more apparent than in our discussion of the Digital Preservation Network (DPN). As she recounted her experience consulting for the project, her voice offered me a retrospective clarity. DPN wasn’t a story about failed technology; it was a story about ignoring market realities in favor of complex, theoretical constructs.
RM: It reminds me of one of the first open projects I was part of—DPN. I feel like I’ve been in so many meetings and on so many grants where we keep reusing the same technology, but the sustainability piece never gets addressed.
KS: Oh, DPN. I lived through that catastrophic reinvention. Steve Morales hired me as a consultant from Educopia back then. I’m a truth-teller, so I told him, “Your people sent you to me because I’m not gonna mince words.”
Steve was convinced there was a market for digital preservation. And I kept saying, “There is no market. We are trying to build a market for digital preservation, but what you are building is a Byzantine project the community can’t afford.”
He’d say, “I’m getting $20,000 a year from all these institutions. I’ve got a market. It’s secure.” I worked with him for less than a year because he wouldn’t take any of the advice I was giving. I had to cut my losses because he wasn’t interested in what I was telling him.
But you’re right about the replication; DPN itself was similar to other distributed digital preservation services that already existed because the personalities involved thought they needed to build it anew. We have to stop doing that. We have to map our way to success in a changing world.
Risk management requires recognizing that most open infrastructures—whether housed in an academic institution or a non-profit—are operating below their revenue needs. Universities, grant funds, or government funds subsidize them, but this has long been invisible to decision-makers. People thought, “LOCKSS? Stanford is taking care of that. Internet Archive? Other institutions are paying for that, so it’s permanent.”
But none of this is permanent infrastructure. Somebody has to be managing the books behind the scenes. Somebody has to manage community governance. Or else that infrastructure isn’t open or stable and becomes a liability rather than a building block.
Mapping the Landscape: From 2.5% to Infra Finder
Next, Katherine and I pivoted to her current work with IOI. Katherine explained the evolution of Infra Finder, a tool designed to bring transparency to this opaque ecosystem. There was a palpable sense of relief in her voice when she described helping to create a public resource that empowers decision-makers.
RM: I’m curious about the work you’re doing at IOI now, specifically Infra Finder and the granting programs. How do those initiatives help solve these “emperor’s new clothes” problems you’ve identified?
KS: My own role in helping to create Infra Finder actually dates back to a small Mellon-funded grant where we tried to map the scholarly communication landscape. I brought ten years of consulting experience to that project. I had worked with clients whose stories were so much worse than Educopia’s—they put our struggles in perspective.
I realized that the open infrastructure people thought was orchestrated and building toward a crescendo was actually floundering. Everybody was just barely staying alive. I wanted to examine the business and governance practices of these projects to better understand them. I’m a sociologist; I want to see the other elements, not just the code.
We put together an abhorrently long survey that people only suffered to answer because they were my friends. But they answered it confidentially. So then I was stuck with a whole lot of information I couldn’t talk about—the number of groups that didn’t have a budget or anything resembling budget-to-actuals. The number of groups that gave me a list of funders, and I’d have to remind them, “You also got funding from X,” and they’d say, “Oh, that’s right, we did.” They weren’t keeping written records, and it was genuinely scary.
Infra Finder has been influenced by that. IOI created it to bring more visibility to open infrastructures in our field. We needed a neutral space that could look across all these different infrastructures and projects to help organizations using the infrastructure see what was working and what needed work, not just technologically but also from business and community angles. It is designed to help those trying to invest in or adopt infrastructure understand what they are actually getting into.
We now have 134 infrastructures in Infra Finder. We can start looking across the body of data. What are the trends? What are the funding patterns over time? Which of these still has a founder twenty years in, who is holding onto the reins—and is that good or bad?
We need that information to make informed decisions about how to consolidate this vast range of work we’ve built into something we can afford to manage. And I use the word “consolidate,” knowing it’s a loaded term. I’m talking about consolidation with a little “c”—where the community chooses it, where we mindfully decide which of these things serves the purpose well, and how we put more resources behind those few things rather than spreading them thin.
Industry Models: Lessons from Women’s Music
This section was a fascinating detour into Katherine’s academic roots. When I asked her about fostering community, she drew a brilliant parallel between open infrastructure and the “separatist” economies of the women’s movement in the 20th century. It was an excellent metaphor for how marginalized groups build power and how staying on the margins for too long can be a risk in and of itself.
RM: You mentioned your background in sociology. I recently listened to the What Now Podcast, where Trevor Noah interviewed Bernie Sanders, who talked about sponsoring dances and basketball games in Vermont because you need to foster community before you can have political engagement. What do you wish we could promote more of within our community?
KS: My graduate work was on the music industry—specifically the interplay between social movements and new genres. For me, it was the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman in my childhood. They made it to Top 40 radio, and it was like, Oh my god, there are lesbians in the world! I’m gonna survive this!
I got to dig into how the women’s movement fostered community through music stages and festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival1. There was a sense of autonomy and a “separatist industry.” It resonates with what we are dealing with in open infrastructure right now. We are trying to build something autonomous.
In the women’s movement, it wasn’t that everyone went into a separatist industry—Ladyslipper Music wasn’t the only distributor people used. But the lesbian-feminist movement laid a strong, separatist foundation through bookstores, record labels, and distribution channels by and for women who weren’t being served by the mainstream industry players. You get these stories of empowerment that are both connected to the industry and separate enough from it that they are controlled by a kind of communal sense. People embraced Ani DiFranco and her Righteous Babes label in part because of all it signified politically and economically. There’s a community around her. Ditto for the Indigo Girls, and for some civil rights activists who wound up making music and impacting the development of both musical movements and actual genres. These genres come into interplay with the industry in these really interesting ways.
I think some of what we’re watching happen within our own profession is similar. What we are involved in—this whole open space—is a social movement. Understanding how these networks and communities function is inextricably linked to knowing how to consolidate infrastructure. You don’t want to break the bonds that have been created, but you also don’t want 16 different networks to try to build the same thing. Sometimes resource scarcity can fuel the construction of common pathways. That’s what (I hope) we can see open infrastructure operationalize instead of continuing to sprawl. It has to be something that happens through extensive knowledge exchange, pushing people toward shared norms, just like those early movements did.
The Non-Commercial Trap
From the sociology of music, Katherine pivoted to the complex economics of our field. She challenged the industry’s binary thinking—open vs. commercial—with the nuance of someone who has seen “good” commercial players and “bad” non-profits. Her argument is clear: an organization’s tax status is not a proxy for its values.
RM: That idea of a separatist industry is so interesting. Can you say more about how that translates to the business side of our industry? We often have this hard line in libraries where “commercial” equals bad.
KS: The notion that “open” is inherently non-commercial is a misconception. You absolutely can be commercial and open, and that can be a genuinely radical approach. We see this with examples like RSpace, a commercial company that embraced open practices and continues to operate successfully. This interplay is essential because, regardless of our preferences, we are operating within a capitalist society. The challenge lies in how we build within these existing structures, embed our values in what we create, and use that as leverage to change the mainstream industry.
A core driver of my career has been to incentivize both commercial and non-commercial players to improve their practices. One way to do this is by making their business models more visible. For instance, if an organization claims to be “open” and has open content, we must ask: what happens if the platform fails? Can anyone retrieve that content and act on it? This is where a focus on open infrastructure becomes necessary.
Another common misconception is that open source isn’t commercial. In the hospital industry, a significant portion of open-source activity is commercial. We need to borrow from other industries and explore different models. An unfortunate, somewhat well-earned vilification has made it difficult for open infrastructures that originated in academia to explore various business and governance models, such as co-ops.
I believe the co-op structure, in which a set of institutions co-invests and profits roll back to shareholders, offers one underutilized, powerful, sustainable alternative. This approach is not about suddenly becoming “profit-minded,” but about being business-minded enough to ensure you have sufficient resources to avoid constantly falling into technical debt, which is crucial in the tech industry.
The “anti-profit” stance prevalent in some parts of our values space is deeply problematic. It’s an unexamined assumption that profit is the problem. In reality, certain types of profit are an issue, but we must remember that a non-profit designation is just a tax status; you can have bad non-profits. This rigid thinking, in which certain “illusions” such as “non-commercial equals good” cannot be questioned, hinders our ability to grow.
Two illusions holding back the open infrastructure space are the unquestioning resistance to consolidation and mergers, and the simplistic view that non-commercial is somehow inherently blessed. We need a thoughtful reimagining of what these terms truly mean, how they function, and what we might be holding ourselves back from achieving because of them.
My Takeaway
My conversation with Katherine Skinner was a powerful reinforcement of a core belief I’ve held for a long time: sustainability is not a destination or a passive state of being; it is an active, often tricky, and complex series of choices. This realization moves us beyond the comfortable fantasy that continued existence is an inherent right simply because our mission is noble.
True sustainability demands constant, critical evaluation and the courage to make hard decisions. We see this in major organizational inflection points—the “leap moment” when an entire community decides to embrace evolution, as we witnessed in the significant effort required for the Fedora migration, or the equally difficult but necessary strategic decision to sunset a beloved but ultimately redundant or resource-draining tool. These moments are defined by intentional action, not inertia.
We must fundamentally change our mindset and move beyond the persistent illusion that funding will magically appear just because our cause is just or our intentions are good. Hope is not a budget line item. As Katherine so eloquently summarized, our path forward requires a shift in strategy: we have to stop reinventing the wheel and instead start building a vehicle we can actually afford to drive and maintain. This means prioritizing shared infrastructure, investing in collaborative, scalable solutions, and accepting that pursuing bespoke, duplicated systems is a luxury we can no longer afford. The future of our work depends on making fiscally responsible, strategic choices today that prioritize long-term resilience over short-term comfort.
The archives at Michigan State University and Smith College are noteworthy resources; the Michigan State archive is likely the most comprehensive: https://findingaids.lib.msu.edu/repositories/4/resources/5983. Additionally, a valuable, more impartial collection is available via Archive-It.