What kind of network is CSIDNet anyway?: Design Choices Behind CSIDNet
By: Angela Okune
I recently had a conversation with someone building a new network in the climate-health space. She is just getting started with figuring out their community architecture and in the conversation several points surfaced that might be relevant for a broader audience. So here you are!
Three ecosystems, not two
When people hear “climate-sensitive infectious disease,” they usually imagine two fields coming together: climate science and health. That intersection is real and it is the core of our field. But CSIDNet sits at a third one: open source software, data, and technology. My own background is in science and technology studies. Before this work, I spent five years in Nairobi’s tech ecosystem. So for me, the technology side of CSID, the open models, the data infrastructure, the communities that sustain software are a core part of why the network exists. We are not only trying to connect researchers and health practitioners, we are also trying to build the shared socio-technical infrastructure that makes CSID tools usable, durable, and locally led.
That third dimension matters for who belongs. We have modelers and epidemiologists, yes, but we also have software developers, data scientists, community health workers, nonprofit staff, and policymakers. The category of “end user” was a deliberate choice to open the door to people who would not necessarily call themselves CSID researchers but whose participation is essential if this field is going to be impactful.
What “global” actually means to us
I am an anthropologist by training. One concept I keep coming back to is “translocal”: the idea that the global is not some neutral meeting ground above local contexts, but rather the connections across very specific, very different local situations. For us, a global network is not everyone gathering in one cosmopolitan city once a year. It is the comparative perspective you build when you have members in Madagascar, Mali, Cameroon, Eswatini, Bangladesh, Argentina, Australia, and Tanzania all working on related problems from different vantage points. The differences matter as much as the commonalities. Finding the connections across those differences is where the interesting work happens. This is also why our regional convenings are not just logistics. They are where we try to grow the network from the ground up, starting with the communities most affected by climate-sensitive disease rather than from the institutions most resourced to fly to an international gathering.
Infrastructure before activities
The first year and a half of CSIDNet’s existence was mostly invisible. We were doing governance work, setting up committees, running trainings on decision-making and power-sharing, figuring out what our values actually meant in practice. It was what some might think of as unsexy operational work. But because of that ground-building, we are now on the path towards an actual community-led community of practice. We have eight committees made up of 80 core members who volunteer their time to keep the network functioning. Those committees do the backbone work: membership, communications, finance, events, etc. The working groups, which are more public-facing and focused on thematic areas, sit on top of that infrastructure. The reason I think this sequencing was right is that we did not jump straight into activities to satisfy an external-facing deliverables list. We built community buy-in first. That means the network is not just a funder-led thing that disappears when the contract ends. It is something people feel belongs to them.
Collaboration as a core skill
I personally believe the most important thing CSIDNet trains for is not technical skill. It is the ability to collaborate well. In a field as complex as CSID, no single person or institution has the full picture. What we actually need are people who know how to work across disciplines, institutions, and very different power and resource situations. So our trainings include not just technical content but also governance: how do we make decisions together? Who has the power to decide what? How do we divide resources equitably?
My hope is that when someone has CSIDNet on their CV, what it signals is that this person knows how to collaborate. That is the kind of scientific culture we are trying to build within this network. I know governance sounds dry. But I believe it is where the heart and soul of good collaboration actually lives. And for a network working across institutions with very different levels of prestige, funding, and visibility, having up-front discussions about these often invisibilized topics ensures that we actually can strive to put the equity we talk about into practice. When you don’t have space to talk about power dynamics, the usual dominant status quo easily becomes the default.
Building for after the funding ends
I have worked in the field of international development long enough to know what to plan for. Catalytic funding ends. The question is whether the community survives it. From day zero, we have tried to build a volunteer culture. Not because we want to extract unpaid labor, but because that is the architecture for community ownership. If everyone expects to be paid because this is a funded project, and then the funding ends, you have nothing. If people have genuine investment in the network as something that is theirs, you have something that can keep going. One of the futures we talk about internally is “exit to community.” No staff, no central budget, just the community continuing the work it has already built the infrastructure to do. That may or may not be where we land. But it has been a real north star for why we have built the way we have.