Episode 4: Elisa Lindinger on Implicit Development Environments (IDE)

Guest

Elisa Lindinger

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to the Digital Infrastructure Fund podcast! This is the podcast where we are discussing what is digital infrastructure and we explicitly focus on people who have been given grants from the Digital Infrastructure Fund. Today, I have the privilege of having as my guest, Elisa Lindinger, who is a Co-founder of SUPERRR. On this episode, we are going to learn more about SUPERRR Lab and what it focuses on, and all about Elisa’s grant title which is Implicit Development Environments (IDE). She goes in depth about the people they interviewed, what they found out from the conversations they had with people, the four different roles they identified, advice they gave funders when looking at these projects, and how the work she did applies to digital infrastructure. Elisa shares some great resources that are worth reading and are related to the work she’s done, and we find out what digital infrastructure means to her. Go ahead and download this episode now to find out more!

[00:01:21] Elisa fills us in on who she is, how she got to where she is now, what SUPERRR is, and what it’s focused on.

[00:03:50] Elisa describes what the main thrust of her grant was called, Implicit Development Environments and if it worked up to expectations.

[00:05:35] We find out how many people they interviewed and more about the interview process. She also tells us about the main findings they found based on the conversations they had.

[00:08:39] Elisa explains four different roles they identified to help developers know where they fit.

[00:10:13] Richard brings up funders and wonders if Elisa had any advice for funders when looking at these projects, trying to figure out who should I fund, how should I work, how should I ask them to set up their developmental processes, how should I enforce governance at these projects.

[00:12:03] Thinking about this work that Elisa talks about and how it applies to developers, communities, and projects, Richard asks how this applies to digital infrastructure in general, and Elisa highlights one of the key insights.

[00:14:00] Elisa explains how human centered design or approaches work. She also tells us where this work went, what happened after she did the interviews and wrote up the nice PDF, and where it is now.

[00:16:37] Richard wonders when Elisa writes the blog posts and she’s working public and going through the whole project, what surprised her the most or what stories did she come across that she didn’t expect to come across, like it didn’t fit in the report but were there anyway.

[00:18:12] Elisa speaks about political funding and which focus points are highlighted through funding.

[00:20:35] Since making this grant, Elisa shares a few great resources that’s related to this sort of work that are worth reading.

[00:22:42] Elisa tells us what digital infrastructure means to her.

Grant Details

Title: Implicit Development Environments (IDE)
Grantees: Elisa Lindinger, Julia Kloiber, Katharina Meyer
Collaborators: Ame Elliott, Eileen Wagner (Simply Secure)
Description: For the Internet to provide the public space necessary for an equal digital society, it needs to be more than just roads and bridges. For this to happen, open digital infrastructure and the people who build and maintain this software must become more visible, more understood, and more appreciated.

Quotes

[00:07:17] “I’d say that the first insight that came up was that there are no easy answers.”

[00:12:25] “I believe that even in open source funding, funders tend to ask questions such as scale, about innovation, like are their similar projects that have already been worked on that are already out there and why do we need another alternative?”

[00:19:30] “So, because infrastructure is interconnected, right? You don’t just take on one pipe and repair it and everything is shiny again. You have to look at the entire system.”

[00:19:38] “And this is the same, even more so, I believe with digital infrastructure.”

Links

Ford Foundation

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Open Society Foundations

Omidyar Network

Open Collective Foundation

Mozilla Open Source Support Program

Richard Littauer Twitter

Richard Littauer (email)

Elisa Lindinger Twitter

Elisa Lindinger Website

SUPERRR

Roadwork ahead: Evaluating the needs of FOSS communities working on digital infrastructure in the public interest

Implicit Development Environments (IDE)

Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure by Nadia Eghbal

‘This is not how we imagined it’: Technological affordances, economic drivers and the Internet architecture imaginary by Niels ten Oever

git commit murder by Michael Warren Lucas

Special Guest: Elisa Lindinger.