Community Conversation reflections: reflections on our community engagement activities for National Capability digital work in 2025

For the National Capability for UK Challenges (NC-UK) programme, we are researching and developing digital research infrastructure (DRI) for environmental science. DRI encompasses all the digital technologies (e.g., monitoring infrastructure, computational resources, platforms/ tools) and objects (e.g., data, data science and AI methods, models) that underpin environmental science. A core part of this research and development is our co-design process, which we initiated in 2025 with the start of our 'Community Conversations' series. These are online workshops that showcase initial DRI ideas and work, gather perspectives and requirements from the community, and together, shape next steps for DRI. This report offers a reflection on the four Community Conversations we conducted in 2025, identifying three areas of improvement for engagement mechanisms in our DRI work moving forward. These consist of: 1) widening our participatory reach and ensuring we incorporate diverse perspectives; 2) developing a strategy to respond to varying event sizes and sharing our experiences of organising such workshops with others; and 3) enhancing our engagement mechanisms moving forward beyond Community Conversations alone.