Interest Area
Infrastructure
Our Thinking
The systems that enable communities to thrive are being reshaped by rapid technological, social, and institutional change. Yet today’s infrastructure, particularly our digital infrastructure, is too often designed around financial incentives and fragmented governance models that fail to support equitable participation. There is an opportunity to reimagine infrastructure so that its design, governance, investment, and long-term stewardship reflect public values and strengthen community power across digital, social, and physical domains. We will support this by exploring how community-driven design, responsible technology governance, strengthened civic knowledge systems, aligned incentives, and physical infrastructure components can serve as the foundation for a more equitable, trustworthy, and future-ready society.
Portfolio Question: How can community-driven design, governance, and stewardship models across digital, social, and physical infrastructure reorient these systems toward equitable participation, trustworthy technology, and resilient civic knowledge for a future-ready society?
Our Hypotheses: We believe that community power and trust are strengthened when investments support community informed research, co-design, and governance models that enable communities to meaningfully shape how digital, social, and physical infrastructure is financed, governed, and stewarded over time, resulting in more resilient, accountable, and trustworthy systems.
Inquiry Area
Civic Knowledge Infrastructure
We believe that strong civic knowledge infrastructure are essential foundations for community power, equitable participation, and resilient civic life. By “civic knowledge,” we mean the shared information, local context, trusted relationships, and community-rooted understanding that enable people to participate in public life and shape the systems around them. Yet today, the institutions, practices, and digital systems that create, preserve, and circulate civic knowledge are fragmented, under-resourced, disconnected from the infrastructure shaping daily life, and rapidly being reshaped by AI in both positive and negative ways. These gaps limit communities’ ability to understand and influence the public decisions that affect them, including how resources are allocated, policies are implemented, and technologies are introduced into civic life.
Our work focuses on community-informed approaches and institutional constellations that create, steward, and activate civic knowledge across libraries, news and information organizations, universities, archives, cultural institutions, and emerging digital civic platforms. By strengthening the local capacities, institutional and personal networks, and digital platforms that allow communities to collectively build and steward this infrastructure, we can surface models for resilient civic knowledge infrastructure.
Sub-Portfolio Question: What conditions, incentives, and evidence are needed to understand how civic knowledge infrastructure strengthens community power and informs more equitable, community-centered infrastructure decisions and design?
Inquiry Area
Emerging Technology Development and Governance
We believe that emerging technologies, including AI and large-scale data systems are reshaping the systems that influence daily life, public participation, and institutional trust. Yet these technologies are often designed and deployed according to private incentives and market logics that prioritize speed, scale, and profit over public values and shared benefit, limiting accountability and constraining communities’ ability to understand and shape how technology evolves.
Our work focuses on efforts that go beyond diagnosing harms or gaps and instead help to develop, pilot, and stress-test alternative models of technology design, deployment, governance, and long-term stewardship. By doing so, we can strengthen accountability, promote responsible innovation, and align technological development with public values and societal needs.
Sub-Portfolio Question: What conditions, incentives, and evidence are needed to shape the design, governance, and institutional oversight of AI and emerging technologies in ways that facilitate responsible innovation and align with public values and needs?
Highlighted Grantees
New_Public
New_Public envisions spaces on the internet that foster connection, facilitate pluralism, and encourage civic engagement. The organization pursues this vision through two main strategies: supporting local communities across the United States in creating more flourishing digital spaces, and developing prototypes for digital conversation in partnership with public service media organizations.
Center for Democracy & Technology
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is the leading nonpartisan, nonprofit organization fighting to advance civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age. They shape technology policy, governance, and design with a focus on equity and democratic values. Established in 1994, CDT has been a trusted advocate for digital rights since the earliest days of the internet.
Media Economies Design Lab
The Media Economies Design Lab begins from the premise that economies are themselves forms of media; they are malleable structures of interaction and meaning-making that organize social life. MEDLab seeks pathways for democratic ownership and governance in the online economy by challenging dominant norms and with neglected histories and possible futures. Drawing on diverse fields such as cultural studies, law, management, media archaeology, organizational communication, and sociology, MEDLab holds space and time for better kinds of business.
Infrastructure Insights
Big Ideas | Reflections
Rural Consultation Series: Rural Innovation Is Happening. Why Don’t We Hear More About It?
In our work—with grantees, through firsthand observation, and in the stories we intentionally seek—we’ve witnessed the power of technological innovation…
News | Reflections
The Quiet Work Shaping Tomorrow
From The Siegel Times, a special edition of our Year in Review, President and Executive Director Katy Knight examines the…
News | Reflections
Our 2025 Year in Review
Introducing The Siegel Times: our 2025 Year in Review, inspired by the look and feel of a classic news magazine…