Open source is regularly funded like a product: build the technology, ship it, move to the next grant. Our research suggests that's the wrong model — and that the gap between "technically mature" and "durably adopted" is where most public-interest open source initiatives quietly fail.

As DataKind expanded its own software portfolio, we set out to understand why. We studied implementation partnerships, governance arrangements, procurement structures, and business operations across four sector contexts, looking for what separated open-source solutions that persisted from those that withered after their initial funding cycle ended. The pattern held across every case: the technology itself was rarely the limiting factor. What determined whether a solution scaled or stalled was whether implementation, stewardship, and support capabilities lived inside the institutions responsible for using it long-term, or remained external — dependent on the original builder, the original grant, or a consultant who eventually moves on.

We call the missing piece adoption infrastructure: the governance, implementation services, maintenance capacity, and partner ecosystems that turn a working piece of open technology into durable public infrastructure. Proprietary vendors build these functions into their business model by default — support contracts, professional services, account management. Open source ecosystems usually don't, which leaves this work fragmented across volunteers, underfunded, or dependent on successive grants that were never designed to sustain it indefinitely.

Four priorities emerged consistently across our research, and this panel will work through each with a different lens:

1. Shared, leveraged use of intellectual property — IP arrangements that preserve public-interest objectives while still creating real incentive for organizations to invest in long-term implementation and support.
2. Long-term stewardship of interoperability standards — treating shared technical standards as public goods requiring ongoing governance and coordination, not one-time specifications.
3. Procurement aligned to implementation, not just licensing — most procurement systems are built to buy software products, not the integration, training, and change management that adoption actually requires — a structural disadvantage for open solutions.
4. Organizational readiness among adopters — successful adoption depends as much on an institution's operational capacity and leadership commitment as on the quality of the technology itself.

We'll also bring in a fourth lens the research surfaced specifically for philanthropy: borrowing from this year's Mozilla Festival theme of "rewilding," we ask what it would mean for funders to stop treating grants as one-time investments in a single project and start treating them as investments in an ecosystem — one where adopters, implementation partners, community stewards, and funders each play a sustainable, interdependent role, the way resilience in ecological systems comes from diversity and interdependence rather than centralized control.

This panel brings together practitioners who've lived this problem from different sides — research, implementation, and funding — to make the case that scaled, lasting adoption of open technology depends on deliberately investing in the infrastructure that sustains it, not just the software that starts it.