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. These values are at the core of each pattern in this toolkit, and in some instances are shared as solutions in and of themselves.
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.