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Community Questions

The questions and answers on this page are based on a transcript from the launch event on July 31st 2025. They reflect questions posed by the audience to the Founding Director, who responded during the live session. Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. For the most current information or additional inquiries, please consult the full documentation or reach out to our team.

What is the best way for cyber infrastructure professionals to engage?

We ahave a community of cyber infrastructure professionals similarly engaged. The platform is built on the National Data Platform, which is a composable cyber infrastructure. That means we can compose and federate compute resources, services, and full stack solutions. If you have any ideas to join, both on the technological foundations of the platform or in the solutions you're working on collectively, we would love to see you either join through a Pathfinder or directly email the team to see if you can be a direct contributor to the platform itself to provide computer resources, services and other AIs and models that you're working on.

Are researchers the main audience for this tool?

No. We have purposefully built this for a cross-sector audience. There are multiple ways - if you're working on a government emergency response tool, it could be through a pathfinder to find the innovators that could help you build it and bring it up. Or if you're building it yourself, it could be to find data and explore data sets as you're bringing to your tools. We can definitely think through this shell-based approach on a part of the Commons being used with the cloud compatible backend for these different solutions. Please engage with the Commons if you're building a tool for government and emergency response as well.

Apart from providing computational resources, does your platform also offer access to data sets or integration of data sets from different platforms?

Yes, the platform has different modalities to access data. One is accessing where the data is right - discovering data that wouldn't otherwise be visible for discovery. This could be even private data that is not directly accessible. In the marketplace, we'd like to make data that's private also discoverable with points of contact to access the data. We have data endpoints as a concept - if you have data and want to provide limited functionality over that data, you can provide access to a set of services to work with the data in that limited engagement mode, and you could be the owner of your data deployment and the service deployment. When folks want to use your data, they actually use it through a set of services rather than direct access to the data.

Are wildland fire managers within the Wildfire Commons? If there is a role specifically for that audience, please describe what tools or processes are geared towards fire managers.

Yes, there is definitely a role for Wildland Fire managers. It comes in multiple ways - you can find data and tools that are up and coming related to what you're doing. We are also going to create mechanisms to evaluate and help evaluate up and coming technology together with community members. Through the pathfinders we have a direct capability to intake the problems you might have that require solutions. If you engage with the community saying you need this specific problem solved and it's a gap in your toolkit, there's a way to bring it to others who are hoping to engage with the platform. We actually prioritize what is a good problem to solve in the first place - that's a big part of bridging the gap. Only Wildland fire managers can identify what the gap is in terms of involving technology and how they want to use that technology.

In addition to researchers, do you also anticipate wildfire Commons participation of user stakeholders, such as fire agencies and local government?

We are not here to be an Operational Intelligence Platform. We are here to enable them to have access to data and linkages between data sets and the community and tools that they can build on. It could be a discovery platform for what exists. In terms of fire agencies and local government, we can definitely engage on the catalogs that can be built into the Commons together with agencies. You can make it a part of the process of procuring and acquiring data. We hope, as a collective with our working group members, we'll be able to provide some guidelines on how a need and maybe a data source in an agency or local government can be integrated with others, and what kind of data sharing and licensing requirements are needed for it.

Are all your tools accessible outside the US?

Right now, we thought of it as a national scale initiative, but accessible to researchers and other members from outside the US. We really think of the future of this as a global collaborative environment that improves collaboration, not just across innovators, but also across governing entities.

What will be the overall governance structure for the Commons?

We started with an open model because we are trying to understand the unknown unknowns. We know what we don't know in the governance structure, but there are also things that will come through our work with the community and the work of our working groups. Our scale and sustain working group and opportunity assessment working group are discussing governance in various forms. Governance will be one of the working groups for year 2 after we demonstrate the functionality of the Commons, because we would love to engage the community to decide on an overall governance structure and a sustainability model for the Commons going forward. It's a big part of our goals for the pilot period.

As the Wildfire Commons continues to grow, do you see a space for non-professional community or citizen science on the platform?

That's an interesting question - where does the community start and end? We don't know. We see the opportunities ourselves, because there's a lot of interest from non-professional or somebody with a need - it could be a community member, citizen scientist. But we also want to be cognizant of collaboratives at the community scale who do the work. One of the methods to do that is to engage with community organizations who actually work with the community and figure out ways for them to be able to utilize, and only then we'll be able to see if this is a space for community or citizen scientists, or do they come through a more organized entity and provide a little bit more governance. This is actually unknown at the moment.