Kathleen Fitzpatrick
I’m noodling a bit today about how we might need to rethink institutional assumptions about longevity as we seek non-extractive alternatives to corporate infrastructure…. https://kfitz.info/longevity/
Longevity and Sustainability
I've been puzzling a bit of late about the relationship between sustainability planning for independent, nonprofit digital projects and the need to provide evidence of that sustainability even as it's being developed. The question has been pitched to me recently as being about longevity: can your project promise potential supporters that it will survive the next ten years?
It's a valid question, especially when the project is one that is in some sense about longevity, about (for instance) preserving the products of knowledge creation for the future. But it's a hard one to answer in the best of times, and goodness knows that we are not currently living through the best of times.
How much have the ways that we think about longevity and sustainability been conditioned by our experiences of working with software and platforms that, even when provided without charge, are operated by massive corporations with resources to burn? These companies can afford to move quickly, to respond to rapid growth, to develop robust user support, and to add new features with the kind of agility that very few small nonprofit or community-based groups can muster.
This is not to say that nonprofit projects should operate freed from any expectations for professionalism, including long-term planning, technical durability and security, attention to user needs, and so on; these are crucial considerations for any piece of infrastructure. But I worry that some of the metrics that we use in thinking about sustainability wind up privileging corporate solutions even when we're seeking values-aligned, non-extractive alternatives.
It will not shock anyone that I'm mostly thinking about my own project in this context.[1] That project has been around for more than ten years, and has over that time demonstrated slow, sustainable growth, but it has been dependent on grant-based, project-oriented funding to support its work. We are now trying to break away from that model and put in place a mature revenue generation model that will allow us to recoup operating costs (and with luck to produce a small margin to support future needs) through membership fees paid by organizations and institutions that want to use our platform. As part of their membership, they get a voice in our governance processes, and thus have the ability to shape the project's future.
But for very understandable reasons, we're hearing questions about the potential longevity of the project, as folks with decision-making responsibility want to be sure that their investment will be to a good end, and that the work they subsequently entrust to the platform will be available over the long term. It's a Catch-22, though, in that without their investment (and the investment of other institutions like theirs) we absolutely will not survive -- so how can I say that our model will have succeeded before the future anterior becomes simple past?
At root: can we shift our thinking so that an investment in a non-extractive alternative is understood to be an investment in the community itself, of which the investor forms a part, in a way that doesn't ask small projects just getting underway to demonstrate all of the durability and agility of corporate alternatives? Can we begin to recognize that some aspects of the durability and agility we've been conditioned to demand have been produced precisely through an extractive economic model that is continuing to impoverish the very commons that we're trying to build? How can we turn the question about the project's longevity into a question about mutual commitment to a shared endeavor?
Though I'm posting this in my own personal pondering space rather than over there because I'm hoping that respondents will think with me about these issues rather than immediately associate them with the project, even though such an association is all but inevitable. ↩︎
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Webmentions
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Some insightful thinking from @kfitz on "Longevity and Sustainability" https://kfitz.info/longevity/
Martin Kalfatovic
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