Thinking like a business: Reconfiguring relationships to sustain open data infrastructures

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how Dryad, an open data infrastructure, reconfigured relationships and implemented new business models to achieve financial sustainability, offering insights applicable to similar infrastructures.

Contribution

It identifies key relationship reconfigurations and strategic changes in Dryad's business model that support the sustainability of open data infrastructures.

Findings

Dryad reconfigured relationships with actors as reinforcing, forging, positioning, and excluding.

Development of a new fee structure altered Dryad's value, community, and governance perceptions.

Emerging tensions highlight challenges in sustaining open data infrastructures.

Abstract

Sustaining open data infrastructures over time is a complex puzzle, involving dynamic funding models and relationships with customers, collaborators, and competitors. Despite their importance, these mechanisms are often hidden from view, limiting their applicability to other infrastructures. In this article, we examine how Dryad, a well-known open data infrastructure, has worked toward financial sustainability by reconfiguring relationships with other actors and by strategically implementing a new business model and process of assetization. We identify four types of relationship reconfigurations with customers, collaborators, and competitors critical to Dryad's financial evolution: reinforcing, forging, positioning, and excluding. We then analyze how Dryad's strategic efforts to develop a new fee structure have changed its interpretations of value(s), community, and governance, factors important in an infrastructure's longevity. We conclude by highlighting emerging tensions that provide insight for other open infrastructures working to become financially sustainable. As a whole, our analysis focuses not just on financial mechanisms for funding open data infrastructures (although those emerge) but on the relationships which enable them.