Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance), funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership of it (insurance).
If an infrastructure is successful and becomes critical to the community, we need to ensure it is not co-opted by particular interest groups.
An organisation that is both well meaning and has the right expertise will still not be trusted if it does not have sustainable resources to execute its mission.
To ensure that the community can take control if necessary, the infrastructure must be “forkable.” The community could replicate the entire system if the organisation loses the support of stakeholders, despite all established checks and balances. Each crucial part then must be legally and technically capable of replication, including software systems and data.
Ultimately the question we are trying to resolve is how do we build organizations that communities trust and rely on to deliver critical infrastructures. Too often in the past we have used technical approaches, such as federation, to combat the fear that a system can be co-opted or controlled by unaccountable parties. Instead we need to consider how the community can create accountable and trustworthy organisations. Trust is built on three pillars: good governance (and therefore good intentions), capacity and resources (sustainability), and believable insurance mechanisms for when something goes wrong. These principles are an attempt to set out how these three pillars can be consistently addressed.
[^1] Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1 http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859 via via http://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/ (cited 5 June 2017)