PDN does more than provide access to knowledge, data, and tools. It actively connects the people who use these resources with those who build and maintain them. Through the Open Community Forum (OCF), researchers, data stewards, public health professionals, and developers come together to exchange feedback, identify needs, and shape how resources evolve in practice. This direct link between resource providers and the broader community extends PDN’s impact beyond data delivery, creating a continuous loop between use, feedback, and improvement.

The Open Community Forum (OCF) is a community-driven venue for discussion, feedback, and knowledge exchange among stakeholders who generate, manage, analyze, share, teach with, or rely on infectious disease data. The OCF brings together researchers, public health professionals, educators, data stewards, tool developers, government agencies, and others who interact with infectious disease data resources.

The OCF is designed to help identify challenges, surface new ideas, and encourage practical recommendations that can improve data resources, tools, training, and collaboration. Through the Pathogen Data Network, the OCF bridges the gap between stakeholders and Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRCs): it is transforming community feedback into improved data resources, tools, and collaboration that are returned to users in forms that support uptake and use.

We organize our engagement around four key pillars (“four Ps”) to ensure all aspects of the data ecosystem are addressed:

Across these four pillars, events in various formats support the needs of the community and the aims of the PDN project, from open dialogue sessions (Open Community Forum) at key international conferences to more targeted, community of practice-oriented workshops (for invited participants).