Programmatic access to biodiversity data is revolutionising large-scale, reproducible biodiversity research. In the marine realm, the largest global database of species occurrence records is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS. As of January 2017, OBIS contains 47.78 million occurrences of 117,345 species, all openly available and accessible via the OBIS API.

A research project often starts with a bright idea and an initial commitment of volunteer time, or perhaps,a fixed term grant. But what happens after that initial activity? How can the project continue tosustain itself? (We define sustainability as the capacity to endure.

Next week I’ll be in Washington DC to meet my peers in research community management as part of the inaugural class of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program! The program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has a mission to improve community building and collaboration in scientific organizations and research collaborations by providing a year of training and support to a cohort of scientific community managers.

Our Community Call on December 15th covered a big topic in tech communities: “How do I create a code of conduct for my event/lab/codebase?”. Here, we cover some of the key themes and considerations that arose from the discussion and point to curated resources and examples to follow when developing a code of conduct (CoC) for your community. Three guest speakers shared different perspectives.

rOpenSci’s overarching mission is to promote a culture of transparent, open, and reproducible research across various scientific communities. All of our activities are geared towards lowering barriers to participation, and building a community of practitioners around the world.

You can find members of the rOpenSci team at various meetings and workshops around the world. Come say ‘hi’, learn about how our packages can enable your research, or about our onboarding process for contributing new packages, discuss software sustainability or tell us how we can help you do open and reproducible research. Where’s rOpenSci?

In order to facilitate a transformation towards open and reproducible research, rOpenSci is building and improving not only the technical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure as well. To support this, occasionally a Community Call will focus on a topic that reflects the values of rOpenSci.

I feel both proud and privileged to join rOpenSci as your Community Manager. I’ve been a compulsive community builder since the early 2000’s, but it has rarely been part of my job description. Now it seems like all roads have led to this. After a couple of fine days of indoctrination at the UC Berkeley home of rOpenSci, I’m settled into work in beautiful Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

Key to the success of rOpenSci is our community and we want to hear more regularly from our members, and foster new interactions among the group. In addition, community calls are a way for us to give important updates, and get feedback on them. We tentatively plan on doing community calls once per month. The format of rOpenSci community calls could be of various types.

In the last 12 months we traveled all over the world delivering talks and hands on workshops at various conferences and universities. This was a great opportunity for us to raise awareness for the project and get more of you involved as contributors and collaborators. As we scale the project to the next level, we need your help in spreading the message. Today we would like to officially announce the rOpenSci Ambassadors program.