The Knowledge Futures Board of Directors has unanimously voted to have Travis Rich return as Executive Director, effective as of the March 18, 2026 board meeting. Travis co-founded KF and served as its first ED before stepping into a Head of R&D role in 2024. Zach Verdin, who took over as ED at that time, will stay on the board and remain part of the leadership team, supporting the transition, fundraising, and organizational strategy going forward.

A message from Travis:

This transition is a continuation of how we’ve always approached leadership at KF: moving into roles as changes, opportunities, and strategy call for it. That’s how we’ve worked from the start and how we’ll continue to work.

I want to first take a moment to talk about Zach and my unending appreciation for him. Zach came in at a time when the specific set of skills KF needed was a fit for him, and he delivered in a way few others could. He made space for the organization to operate more effectively. He navigated us through a period of intense repositioning, through some genuinely hard conversations, and through a funding landscape that was shifting under our feet. He always served the organization and its people as well as possible with the landscape and cards at hand. We would be in a worse place without his leadership, and I’m grateful that he’ll remain on the board and part of the leadership team going forward.

Given this changing landscape, KF is focusing on a leaner approach that lets us build more diverse infrastructure more quickly. A few steps in this process are already underway:

• We’ve cut PubPub’s operating costs significantly, which means we can keep PubPub alive for years into the future at a much more modest rate. Our technical focus on making PubPub affordable and stable for the long term goes into the details.
• We’re expanding our collaborations to build beyond the small set of tools we had been grant-funded to build in the past, some of which we’ll be announcing soon.
• We’re building with stability and sustainability at the front of our minds. Everything we build we intend to last. The communities that depend on us should be able to count on our infrastructure.
• We’re opening pathways for our work to be directly supported by those who rely on it. Our sustainability fund is the first step in this direction - and allows us to be aligned directly with the needs of our communities.

We’re committed to our role in this space: leading with creativity and the technical ability to build fast, while also remaining committed to the stability and broad availability of the infrastructure we maintain.

PubPub and KF have evolved so much over the years, driven enormously by the passion and actions of communities that picked up this platform and ran with it. When we started building PubPub, it was because we felt simple, dependable infrastructure could improve the quality and accessibility of the work so many of us pour our hearts and souls into. Tools that give us more time for that work, and less time wrestling with processes that don’t serve it but have somehow become required for it to exist. We still believe there is a lot to build that furthers our mission and makes the knowledge we are all producing more useful. We love to build, and we love to build with you. If you have ideas, questions, or just want to say hi, reach out anytime at [email protected].