Sprint 6 - Enabling Open Infrastructure

Sprint Objective – To establish a shared foundation of societal narrative, effective policies, digital infrastructure, and orchestration capacity that enables exponential change, together.

At this point in our journey, we appreciate the actors in our ecosystem, what they give to and get from one another (value exchange) and ways in which we can build their ability to act and co-create. Now, let’s think about setting in place the foundation that will help these actors do more and better, co-create various social innovations, as well as, induce network effects at scale.

To mobilise the ecosystem, it is important to make coordination (bringing together siloed actors to align and work towards a shared goal), interaction (ensuring actors exchange value) and knowledge diffusion (ongoing cross-pollination of insights between multiple actors) simple, cost-effective and trust-based. This is where our foundation, or infrastructure, comes in.

At its best, infrastructure can infuse abundance in the system. It opens up possibilities for many actors to come together, use shared capabilities and build beyond and better to solve problems faster and cheaper (think Internet). At the heart of such infrastructure is openness. Though it manifests as low barriers to entry for multiple actors to create and co-create, openness is a deliberate design decision.

At a philosophical level, openness means a deep belief in building public goods that are characteristically non-excluding, easy to access, and do not get depleted but enriched with adoption. This translates to technical openness (accessible, open standards, interoperable), legal openness (for all manners of use and adaptation) and financial openness (free or low-priced access). At a design level, openness can mean creating modular and interoperable components that many can reuse, remix or repurpose across contexts.

As more and more actors align and act using open infrastructure, the ability to solve problems gets distributed across diverse societal actors (communities, civil society, government and markets) and the value being created and exchanged gets amplified. This is the potential of open infrastructure – it makes problem-solving more effective, less expensive and more efficient for the ecosystem at scale.

Open infrastructure can be of (though not limited to) the following types:

• Shared narrative: A unifying understanding, rooted in the voice of the community, that can engage all ecosystem actors to respond responsibly and mobilise collective action.

• Effective policy and regulations: Coherent implementable standards and frameworks that enable and safeguard inclusive service delivery across diverse contexts sustainably.

• Digital infrastructure: Minimal and interoperable digital systems that enable safe, inclusive and efficient interactions at scale, improve network effects and enhance the ability of all actors.

• Orchestration capacity: Multi-stakeholder participatory structures that facilitate and improve accountable and coordinated implementation of actions to achieve impact at scale.

While building or leveraging open infrastructure, it is important to keep in mind that less is more. Could we put in place a foundation that supercharges the efforts of the ecosystem? In this sprint, we will identify the actions / initiatives to select, design, implement and sustain relevant open infrastructure (narrative, policy / regulations, technology and orchestration).

Reimagining Education Leadership

To better appreciate the sprint journey, we are following the story of how ShikshaLokam has been developing 4.5 million education system leaders in India. For this sprint, we will illustrate the shared foundation(s) they enabled to reduce the friction to solving together, at scale.

Once ShikshaLokam had identified the abilities key actors in the ecosystem had and needed, they set out to find the infrastructure that would enable actors to build and improve relevant abilities and co-create. At the time, efforts of the ecosystem were stifled or limited because of a few challenges – lack of alignment and urgency around leadership development as a lever for change, lack of cohesive and reusable knowledge and lack of policy for direction and momentum.

To start with, ShikshaLokam explored four types of infrastructure:

• Shared narrative: ShikshaLokam spread the idea of education system leadership through workshops, small convenings and storytelling. They facilitated co-creation of a shared narrative around why leadership matters, supported by lived experiences of partners and existing literature.

• Talent infrastructure: They invested in creating an incubator, EduMentum, to encourage early-stage entrepreneurs working on systems change leveraging the agency of education leaders; thus seeding a network of emerging organisations with shared vision and values.

• Digital infrastructure: The team built the first version of the ShikshaLokam platform leveraging and contributing to the building blocks of Sunbird as a minimal digital backbone that could host and enable creation and sharing of learning resources for leadership development.

• Effective policy: ShikshaLokam worked with national and state-level institutions to embed leadership into existing policy frameworks such as Samagra Shiksha, SCERT mandates and National Education Policy (NEP).

By laying these foundations (and then many more over the years to follow), ShikshaLokam has worked on bringing actors together towards a shared goal, lower barriers to design and innovation, implement leadership development solutions, share value with the ecosystem and sustain bias for action.

As the team enabled open infrastructure to make solving faster, easier and cost-effective, they began wondering how they’d know if what they were doing was actually working… More in the Next Sprint!

Now let us prepare for this sprint together… Please reflect on these questions from your perspective.

• What challenges in coordination, interaction and knowledge diffusion affect the ecosystem?

• What types of open infrastructure* may enable key actors to co-create and solve problems?

• What infrastructure exists already? How can it be leveraged / augmented for better outcomes?

*Open infrastructure can be of (though not limited to) the following types: shared narrative, effective policy and regulations, digital infrastructure and orchestration capacity.