Welcome to the Digital Toolkit for Collaborative Environmental Research, or DIGITCORE.
Introduction
Openness is often regarded as an inherent good, valued for its promises of transparency, accessibility, and collaboration; we wanted to understand how these ideals are realized in practice for communities facing the direct consequences of environmental and climate harm.
The Digital Toolkit for Collaborative Environmental Research (DIGITCORE) synthesizes what we learned when we asked: How is “open” experienced by frontline communities participating in environmental research? We present the findings of our research as a toolkit—in the form of values, themes, patterns, solutions, and resources—with the goal of offering technologists and researchers collaborating on open infrastructure an interactive tool to support their practice. We each know our own craft, but often lack the tools for genuine collaboration; this toolkit focuses on where changes in process or design can make a meaningful difference.
Themes & Patterns
Through our research, several themes emerged that have helped organize the patterns we surfaced. While these themes are often interrelated, they group together distinct needs, practices, and realities that different audiences experience and navigate. Click on each theme to see what patterns they include, as well as relevant solutions and resources.
We use patterns as the basic unit of this toolkit to describe challenges, problems, and phenomena experienced or observed by our participants. Pattern language is also commonly used by software engineers. Click on patterns to read more about them and see their associated solutions and resources. And see our FAQs for more on our rationale to use pattern language.
How to Use This Toolkit
This toolkit encourages you to “choose your own adventure”. While you can explore using any entry point or pathway, we’ve primarily structured this site using themes and audiences as organizing principles so you can readily find the content that’s most related to you and your interests. You can also explore using the Glossary or Tags.
In the top-right corner of your screen, you’ll see a “carrier bag”. As you go through the toolkit, click ‘Add to Carrier Bag’ to create your own curated version filled with the patterns, solutions, and resources you want to come back to. To learn more about the Carrier Bag, open up your bag or head to the FAQ.
Audiences
This toolkit is first and foremost intended for open technology projects, developers, and researchers (all of whom may include members of frontline communities). These are our primary audiences because they are often the individuals encountering the “boundaries of open” and seeking effective strategies to produce and manage environmental data in the public interest. Our emphasis on these groups tries to turn on its head the reality that frontline communities are often the ones expected to adapt their practices to fit the frameworks of research initiatives or government procedures. That said, community organizations, as well as research institutions and funders that support, resource, and govern these other groups, will find valuable solutions and resources throughout this toolkit. Below we define these audiences in more detail.
Researchers
Researchers are people and groups collecting information to answer environmental questions in collaboration with frontline communities. They may be affiliated with formal institutions, work more independently, or be members of frontline communities themselves. They may also be developing or using open technology.
Open source technologists
Open source technologists are people, projects, and companies developing digital and data infrastructure using open source practices, and often for the purposes of making data or other resources available and accessible. They may be working in collaboration with researchers or frontline communities to develop technology to make sense of environmental and socio-environmental phenomena.
Community organizations
When we use the term “community organizations,” we’re generally referring to what the United Nations’ calls Civil Society Organizations, or:
“any non-profit, voluntary citizens’ group which is organized on a local, national or international level. Task-oriented and driven by people with a common interest, civil society organisations (CSOs) perform a variety of services and humanitarian functions, bring citizens’ concerns to Governments, monitor policies, and encourage political participation at the community level.”
Here, they tend to be organized around geographically-situated environmental issues or interests. They may be formal not-for-profit organizations or less formal groups of neighbors with shared goals. They may also serve as intermediaries between individual members of frontline communities on the one hand and industry, government, research, or technology firms on the other.
By “frontline communities,” we mean geographically identifiable collectives bearing a disproportionate burden of pollution or hazards posed by climate change. In the context of this toolkit, these groups use or attempt to use open infrastructures in their efforts to understand environmental processes or to address environmental justice problems like pollution.
Research institutions
Research institutions are formal organizations that staff researchers and govern their practices at a high level (e.g., imposing ethical review processes, openness practices, or intellectual property requirements). They include: universities, national laboratories, public research agencies, think tanks, and nonprofit research organizations. While they may staff environmental researchers or focus on environmental research, their interests often extend beyond environmental questions.
Funders
Funders are public agencies, private foundations, companies and other sources of capital that provide funding for research and technology development in the form of grants, awards, or venture capital. Like research institutions, they may also govern research and development practices by imposing requirements on those they fund (e.g., open licensing or reporting practices).
Values
The DIGITCORE toolkit aims to ground open infrastructure development in the practice-based work of organizers and their collaborators. To situate the themes, patterns, solutions, and resources, we’ve articulated the values that openness aspires to—values identified by research participants who are using, or considering using, open infrastructure to support collaborative environmental research.
Openness is tailored.
Digital tools are used in unique contexts where culture, geography, ecosystems, politics, and economics collide. Open infrastructure should provide situational flexibility regarding how information is collected, analyzed, maintained, protected, used, and made available (or not) for sharing.
Open infrastructure prioritizes mobilization.
Open technologies are implemented by individuals and organizations whose role is to motivate, engage, and encourage communities. Open practices, tools, and objects should enable action.
Flexibility is a feature.
Organizing work needs to adapt to potentially rapid and urgent shifts in policy, politics, or environmental conditions. Relatedly, communities understand how external attention to the issues they face comes in cycles. The development of open infrastructure should be responsive to the varying timelines and circumstances faced by different communities.
Open infrastructure upholds place-based care.
Environmental justice efforts generate strategies to take care of places and the people who live there. Open infrastructure must be developed in conversation with, and in relation to, community practices of care.
Open infrastructure meets the demand for readily available information.
Open infrastructure and tools should facilitate the accessibility and availability of information in a timely manner, enabling communities to make informed decisions.
Open infrastructure addresses prohibitive costs.
Open infrastructure makes it possible to produce, share, maintain, and use information in an accessible way.