Releasing our 2023-2026 Strategic Plan

In 2021-2022, the CS&S core team engaged in a process of brainstorming, editing, gathering feedback, and revising efforts towards our first strategic plan. Aligned with our commitment to transparency and accountability to partners and collaborators, we’re proud to share the results of this: CS&S’s 2023-2026 strategic plan.

Any strategic document is a reflection of a team at a moment in time and the view of the future from that moment. This plan comes out of our team’s first rounds of articulating organizational goals and committing to track our performance against them over the years ahead. We used a variety of structures and mechanisms including individual brainstorming, synchronous team-wide discussions, outside facilitators (shout out to Marigold Strategy!), external reviewers, and asynchronous review. As we experimented with different forms of group writing with a growing team and synthesizing feedback we reckoned with how difficult these processes can be.

As we launch this plan, we are reminded that the horizon of strategic work is long, much longer than the shorter reward cycles of other parts of our work. We envision a future where open research, data, and technology effectively work towards equitable distribution of resources, knowledge, and power. This three-year strategic plan builds the foundation for this vision through three goals.

Our first goal is to advance community-rooted research, data, and tech work by developing and showcasing a vibrant, global network of projects, grantees, and collaborators. This goal commits CS&S to continuing to support innovative, community-centered work through fiscal sponsorship, grantmaking, and community incubation. Our second goal is shaping an equitable future of research, data, and tech by cultivating forward-thinking research and services in partnership with an interdisciplinary network of collaborators. This goal expresses our commitment to partnerships as the path to our greatest impact. We want to leverage our experience and position to elevate partners and innovate on new work, not try to do it all ourselves. Our third and most foundational goal is to craft an enduring organization. It’s going to take time and labor to build the organization capable of the work and impact we envision. Over the next three years, CS&S will invest in governance, organizational processes, and evolving organizational culture to maintain a solid foundation for our programmatic work.

July marked the beginning of fiscal year 2023-2024 and the first quarter of working with the framework of the strategic plan to guide daily work. As we do so, we are iterating aspects of the plan, such as how to make our commitments to “open” work in a “global” ecosystem more specific and actionable. As in the other steps of this process, we’re learning as we go, and look forward to sharing our progress.

We thank our entire team, our Board of Directors, and extended community of projects and grantees who have offered feedback and support.


Photo by Jonny James on Unsplash.