In the late-2025 we shared an OSS Group Survey to help us understand:

• Who is our OSS Community?

• What does this community want/need from WILDLABS?

• What should be our priorities?

If this is news to you- please share your opinion on our Group Survey (link here). We would be happy to compile additional feedback as a comment to this post. 

Thanks to all who completed our survey! We really appreciate the feedback, and we are working on hosting a Networking/Community building event (stay tuned!). We hope this will be the first of many community building events (among other things). 

Do these responses spark ideas or actionable items? Any other reactions/thoughts? Please respond in the comments!

Shannon, Pen & Bri

Your OSS Group Leaders

Here are our survey results:

What are BARRIERS to creation & adoption that you see? 

(Response Summary)

• Funding and Sustainability: Lack of long-term sustained funding is a major barrier, especially for hardware, maintenance, and documentation, as most scientific projects have short timelines (1-2 years).
• Documentation and Usability: Insufficient or lacking documentation, time/funding for maintenance, and poorly documented Git repositories prevent adoption, while easy-to-access video tutorials for new users are needed.
• Skills and Expertise: Limited skills and expertise, along with the time and focus required to learn specialized knowledge (e.g., Linux command-line), limit the use of available tools.
• Collaboration and Project Proliferation: Too many similar projects and a lack of collaboration mean many open source projects never reach a useful state and are abandoned.

• Software Access and Quality: Barriers include limited access to robust software and the need for continued support to ensure long-term stability in open source software.

   

Is there a specific OSS community NEED that we should TEAM UP to tackle? (Response Summary)

• Community Building: Needs include building community, including in-person interaction, and bringing together people from various fields within open science (data, hardware, software) to ensure conversation and collaboration.
• Collaboration & Projects: Fostering collaboration in various use cases (e.g., camera trap or bioacoustic management) and designing community conservation projects are identified as needs.
• Data Publishing: A specific need is to improve publishing data in a reusable, format-agnostic, and location-independent way, finding better methods to cite, archive, and publish datasets that are not tied to specific technologies or platforms.
• Technical Focus: Developer tutorials are requested, and one respondent mentioned being part of a group using GUIX, a package manager focused on reproducible builds.

Additional Ideas? Suggestions? Comments?                                                            (Response Summary)

• Collaboration and Networking: Suggestions included teaming up with the Software Developers group for a crossover event like a coffee-chat online networking meetup, or creating a tutorial/panel on contributing to open source software (OSS).
• Developer Support: There is interest in opportunities for developers to work on open source software or hardware.
• Data Management: A suggestion was made to become more systematic about versioning and archiving Digital Biodiversity Heritage.
• Funding: A request was made to share funding opportunities through their networks.
• Appreciation: Respondents expressed thanks and happiness that this survey is being conducted.