Katharina Meyer

Katharina is an ecosystem analyst and research director active at the intersection of material and immaterial public goods, critical digital infrastructure and the social groups and technologies that shape, break or reinforce them. 

Since summer of 2023 she is the inaugural Director of the  Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, an initiative by Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Group and Schmidt Futures sustaining a platform for academics and practitioners to better understand how open digital infrastructure is built and deployed. Through open calls and commissions, D//F curates a body of research and implementation insights that advance a mutual goal: to ensure a public commons of technology, for the benefit of everyone. 
Prior to this role, she was Head of Research at the Sovereign Tech Fund, supporting the critical open building blocks in networked computing and developer-facing software components. 
Earlier, she worked with The New Institute Hamburg, looking at the creation, governance and technical implementation of Urban Data Commons feeding into broader Strategies of using Data for the enforcement of environmental policies as a program lead of „New Hanse“.

A historian of science and technology by training, she is researching codes, standards and protocols, policies and laws, practices and values at the intersection of society and technologies and is especially interested in ontologies, epistemologies and genealogies,  deploying qualitative as well as quantitative methods along multiple disciplines.
Katharina is advising in the NGI Commons,  project has been a reviewer for Investing in Open Infrastructure, the German Ministry of Research and Education, the Open Forum Academy Symposium and a Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg as well as the Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum. She regularly collaborates with scientists, media and conceptual artists for artworks, exhibitions and narratives and was a Curator for the invited program at conferences like re:publica and STATE.