Sustaining open source digital infrastructure

While only twenty years ago open-source software was simply a curiosity that attracted the attention of a few academics and was not seriously considered in the software industry, open-source software today is ubiquitous: it powers applications in virtually every domain, and its economic impact has been estimated at many billions of dollars per year. Given the importance of open-source digital infrastructure to so much of the economy, one might expect that it is adequately staffed and maintained, i.e., sustainable. Yet, as recent reports show, this is often not the case: most users of open-source infrastructure take it for granted, and society at large is unaware of the risks. In this talk, I will review some of the challenges that open-source digital infrastructure faces today and I will give an overview of mixed-methods empirical results from my group investigating and addressing these challenges from a socio-technical perspective.