Episode 8: Rayya El Zein on the Digital Infrastructure Incubator

Update: 2022-04-18

Description

Guest

Panelist

Richard Littauer

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to the Digital Infrastructure Fund Podcast! This is the podcast where we focus on recipients of the Digital Infrastructure Grant Fund which has funded by multiple funders. We don’t just interview current cohorts, but also past cohorts who have gotten funding from this grant pool. Today, I’m very excited with all my guests. We have one repeat guest, Rayya El Zein, who is the Program Manager of the Digital Infrastructure Incubator at Code for Science and Society and all of her relevant cohorts. Rayya is here to explain the digital incubator she’s been building and how it works, introduce five of the teams they’ve been working with this year, and we’ll learn more about the six projects. There are three focus groups, Governance, Community Engagement, and Cultural Infrastructure, and we’ll learn more about what these cohorts have been working on in each of them. Go ahead and download this episode to learn much more!

[00:01:08 ] Rayya explains the digital incubator she’s been building and how it works.

[00:02:57 ] Our first cohorts, Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal and Heather Turner, explain how they’re building community around the R Development Guide.

[00:05:47 ] Batool Almarzouq from the Open Science Community-Saudi Arabia tells us about the Cultural Infrastructure Focus Group, the FAIR Principles, and the right to left languages.

[00:09:16 ] The team from Council Data Project (CDP), Nic Weber and Jackson Maxfield Brown, speak about their work in the Civic Tech Space and what the Council Data Project is all about, and Code for America.

[00:12:57 ] Stephan Druskat, a team member in the Governance focus group and represents the Citation File Format project explains what they do.

[00:17:46 ] The last team is Gemma Turon and Miquel Duran-Frigola, co-founders at the Ersilia Open Source Initiative. They tell us where you can get involved in their projects online, and if you’re a larger organization, where you can contribute funds, developers, time, assets, money, etc.

[00:23:35 ] Rayya talks about Solar Protocol, which is the sixth team that is not with us today, and the team that accompanies Ersilia in the Community Engagement Focus Group. We also find out what Rayya is most excited about for this project.

[00:26:50 ] Find out about a wrap-up event that will be happening to learn more about all this work with these six projects.

Grant Details

Title: Dig. Inf. Incubator

Grantees: Rayya El Zein, Danielle Robinson

Description: Supporting projects to implement research-informed best practices at the time of need on governance, sustainability, and inclusion.

Code for Science & Society's cohort program is designed to amplify the impact of research-based recommendations by providing tailored support for open source project leaders as they iterate solutions around a single sociotechnical challenge.