RSAfrica26 Day 2 Keynote: Who gets to become infrastructure?

Who Gets to Become Infrastructure? Tracing the Open Source Technologies Behind Africa's Digital Public Infrastructure Presented at Research Software Africa 2026 by the CHAOSS Africa Research Focus Group. Open source software increasingly supports Africa's Digital Public Infrastructure, health records, payments, identity, education, etc., but technical adoption is not the same as institutional recognition, and deployment is not the same as sustainability. This talk presents early findings from an ongoing, community-led mapping study asking: which open source technologies are embedded in African DPI, and what conditions determine whether governments formally recognise and sustain them? This is work in progress, presented deliberately at an early stage to invite critique, corrections, and collaborators. The full research protocol, data extraction framework, and working notes are published openly on OSF at this link; this record contains the presentation slides and an accessible companion document. CHAOSS Africa is the African chapter of CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software), a Linux Foundation project.