This governance and sustainability needs assessment summarizes our findings and preliminary recommendations for the Catalyst project. Supported by CZI, the Catalyst project is a collaborative effort among six partner organizations to achieve four goals: (1) Deploy and manage open cloud infrastructure for under-resourced communities in Latin America and Africa, (2) Create training and pedagogical content to assist others in using this infrastructure for cloud-based science workflows, (3) Build capacity for technical, pedagogical, and leadership skills within these communities, and (4) Identify a participatory service model to sustain, scale, and generalize impact for global communities. The project timeline spans from October 2022 to March 2025. The report presents IOI's initial findings around governance and sustainability elements and identifies critical elements that would benefit from collective work. Based on our interviews with project leads and desk research findings, we present a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis and a summary of emerging themes on governance and sustainability expectations for the project. We contextualize this information with our extensive desk research on models and implementations used by similar open source computational services and cloud service providers. We outline our next steps for the Catalyst Project, focusing on working sessions (from October 2023 to February 2024) with project participants for co-producing governance and sustainability structure and norms.

Funding for this research was provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).