Xeno-canto

We submitted our contribution to the European Commission’s open consultation on European Open Digital Ecosystems: https://lnkd.in/d4_J4w5F There's a structural funding gap threatening European #DigitalSovereignty: innovation gets funding over maintenance; the “invisible” work of keeping critical infrastructure running stays chronically underfunded. The result is technical debt, volunteer burnout and sovereign risk. Even widely-adopted, technically successful projects face existential threats without business development capacity and financial resilience. We proposed 2 measures: 1. Fund sustainable operations models. Explore beyond project grants to mechanisms that actually support long-term maintenance, technical debt reduction, and supply chain security. Digital sovereignty requires infrastructure that stays operational. 2. Invest in ecosystem capacity building, e.g. business development and financial planning skills for maintainers/contributors; cohort-based capacity development across infrastructures, and incentives for commercial beneficiaries to contribute back. This is about building transferable capabilities that strengthen infrastructure resilience in the long term. The cost of fragile infrastructure affects everyone: maintainers facing burnout, researchers whose work stalls when tools break, institutions losing sovereignty to technological lock-in. If you would like to submit your views, the submission will close at midnight tonight (Brussels time). #OpenSource #OpenInfrastructure #Sustainability

I'm an ecologist turned entrepreneur. Not everyone understands this decision, so here’s the honest reason I made the shift. After years of developing technology like open-source acoustic recorders, camera trap AI models, wildlife alert systems, and software for academic research, I noticed a pattern: We’d build something incredible, publish the research in a peer-reviewed journal, release it as open source, and then, we’d have to move on. I assumed everyone would adopt these tools because they were free and published in good journals. The issue is that over time, maintaining open source tools can become challenging. There is no long-term budget for engineers to maintain software or to pay for ongoing customer support. The end-result can mean there is no strong incentive to keep completely free tools alive. There are many amazing open source success stories (QGIS, the Linux operating system, etc.), but these have a very wide user base across multiple sectors - which naturally leads to a broader set of people who want to contribute to their maintenance. For biodiversity tech, open source is a difficult model, and if we want this sector to scale, business must be a part of the solution. Not instead of research or in place of open source, but as another crucial piece of the nature-technology puzzle. It has its challenges, but a for-profit business model can offer more predictable revenue than most grant cycles can. Organisations are willing to pay for services and software that solve urgent biodiversity data and compliance needs efficiently and cost-effectively. This is what I set out to build at Okala, and it's rewarding to see the impact we've been able to make on biodiversity conservation. We've also been able to make use of other people's open-source efforts (too many to list, from open source Python libraries to incredible biodiversity AI models). Next year, my mission for Okala is to start 'giving back' to the community. For example, we now have some of our own datasets from in-house projects that can be shared back to the open-source community. My experience in both worlds allows me to now see business as one practical way to scale biodiversity technologies and help others reach their conservation goals. Thanks to a mix of open source and proprietary tech, we've lasted long enough to now be in a position to give something back. 📷 Me surveying birds in British woodlands during my PhD in 2014.

Meet the Busuanga Squirrel (Sundasciurus hoogstraali). This poorly known species only occurs on the Philippine Island of Busuanga, on the Palawan Faunal Region. It is not as poorly known as the related Culion Squirrel (more on that later), but the recording I made of the call of this individual was the 13001st species to be recorded on Xeno-canto: https://lnkd.in/eb7SsveJ