Patterns

Scan the index of patterns that exist in the toolkit, categorized by theme, to discover new patterns to share or incorporate into your own work.

Theme

Situational Collaboration Practices

The success and longevity of open infrastructure often depend on effective collaborations. These in turn rely on governance mechanisms that match the needs of the project, clear expectations about roles, responsibilities, and practices in collaborative relationships, frequent communication, and planning for the future.

Partners and clients have different needs

Different types of community collaborators have different expectations.

Plan for the future

Frontline community concerns, priorities, and strategies shift over time.

Iterative tool development can create instability

While iteration is key to improving functionality and a fundamental part of agile development, constant iteration can create instability for users who rely on certain features and stable tools.

Overly complex governance

Open communities often aspire to strong governance structures—specifically those supporting openness as a value.

Theme

Practicing Openness

Openness is a core principle of open infrastructure, but its meaning and implementation can vary widely. To find alignment on what open means to different stakeholders necessitates: balancing mandates alongside community privacy, addressing commercialization pressures, and creating processes to make openness a daily practice. You can read more on our findings around openness in the introduction.

Pressure to commercialize

As open source tools in environmental research gain traction through wider adoption, external stakeholders such as funders or universities often ask about their business models.

Mandated vs. meaningful openness

Researchers must often respond to funder or institutional requirements or requests to make their data public.

Openness as a daily practice

Openness is often framed as a goal or value, but it can be most effectively pursued when it becomes ingrained in workflows, relationships, and assumptions.

The limits of open tool usability for frontline communities

While standardized transparency and documentation practices can showcase an open source tool's validity and sustainability, frontline communities may not have the technical capacity to use or replicate them.

Open means different things to different people

Different interpretations of "open"—whether referring to open data, open source software, or open engagement practices—can influence a project's direction or lead to disagreements in design.

Theme

Ensuring Benefit to Frontline Communities

Within the development of open infrastructure, ensuring benefit to frontline communities means going beyond access and inclusion to prioritizing ownership and collaboration. This involves sharing leadership in decision making, providing resources for collaborating, minimizing harm and maximizing benefit, supporting data sovereignty, and creating accountability mechanisms.

Respect frontline communities’ time and effort

Research activities can be time-consuming, especially if community members are involved in analysis and interpretation.

Hold outsiders accountable

Research practices, even when well-intentioned, can cause harm, especially if transparency and shared decision-making are not prioritized.

Enhance frontline communities’ agency

Communities’ agency is respected when they are able to lead or co-lead in decision-making.

Reduce harm to communities

Communities may hesitate to engage in research or collaborative efforts, fearing immediate risks to their safety, dignity, or livelihoods.

Theme

Long-Term Sustainability

The long-term viability of open infrastructure depends on securing resources for ongoing maintenance, finding a balance between scale and specificity, and supporting local champions.

Champions within civil society organisations need more support

Many participatory science initiatives rely heavily on local champions and community members to bridge the gap between scientists and the public.

Balancing scale and specificity

Developers who aim for generalizability and scalability in their tools often sacrifice place-based specificity and alignment.

Open tools need ongoing maintenance

Open source tools often end up in the “graveyard”: unmaintained, under-documented, and ultimately unknown.

Theme

Data ≠ Information

Open infrastructure should go beyond making data available; it should also aim to make it understandable, usable, and trustworthy. This can be accomplished through adequate metadata, consistent quality standards, and interoperable systems, as well as resources and support for communities to interpret data.

Lack of standardization for data quality

Open data platforms may integrate information from multiple sources, they may provide access to raw data, or both.

Isolated open data repositories

Environmental and scientific data is often siloed in isolated repositories, project-specific databases, or organizational websites.

Adequate metadata requires capacity

Metadata, or information about data, is essential for enabling reuse, ensuring transparency, and supporting long-term impact.

Meaning-making takes resources

In order for data to be broadly useful, it must be analyzed, transformed, visualized, or otherwise processed.

Theme

Academic Culture and Norms

Responsive and accessible open infrastructure requires a level of dynamism that can be incompatible with academia’s slower-moving culture and career advancement pathways that prioritize journal publications. Projects that seek to develop open infrastructure, whether for broad use or for specific contexts, should discuss, negotiate, and align norms around timelines and collaboration rhythms.

Frontline communities’ and academia’s differing norms, time frames, and practices

Environmental researchers are part of epistemic communities whose norms and time frames are often incompatible with the needs and cultures of more place- and trust-based frontline communities.

Readiness for collaboration

Academic researchers and engineers may engage in research without having the level of social-cultural understanding or experience needed to develop appropriate strategies.