Notes from Living Atlases workshop TDWG 2018 - AtlasOfLivingAustralia/documentation GitHub Wiki

The following notes were taken by Nick dos Remedios at the 2018 TDWG conference during the Living Altases workshop (W06), which was organised by Marie-Elise Lecoq. See session details: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.2.25487.

The general topic of discussion was centred around the future governance, code sharing and roadmap for the maintenance and development of core software components that comprise the Living Atlases code base.

  • Marie-Elise Lacoq (GBIF France) talked about wanting to see some governance and agreed framework for managing the LA code into the future
  • Nick showed a slide from his introduction talk - see image:

Image of slide from TDWG

  • Lee Belbin (ALA) talked about the planned collaboration between ALA and Brazil on the Spatial Portal, with a meeting planned for September to discuss how the two organisations will work together, etc. It was suggested this collaboration tie into the Living Atlases governance, etc. He also suggested there should be one or more people appointed to lead certain aspects of the LA program, such as a technical lead role (Nick adds: as well as community coordinator role)
  • Donald Hobern (GBIF) talked about GBIF's role in the LA program and how they've invested about $100k over 5 years in funding the annual workshops. The nature of the funding will change in 2019 with money only available for GBIF countries and other minor changes.
  • Marie-Elise suggested a board be assembled to oversee activities and set long term goals and vision, etc. This could include non-GBIF members and could assist with funding of workshops.
  • Patricia Mergen (Belgium) talked about their experience with adapting the DigiVol application and the issues with translations, etc. Sharing the work of adding more multi-lingual functionality would be welcome as they currently contract a third party to make the changes, which is quite expensive and has issues of its own. She suggested an SLA to handle sharing of costs and maintenance of DigiVol. She also shared her frustration is getting answers to technical questions about the feasibility of adding certain functionality into DigiVol. She needed answers to these questions in order to submit a grant application but as answers were never provided the grant was abandoned.
  • General discussion about channels of communication between developers and others in community. Currently developers are using HipChat to chat but this has the issue of history being deleted after a period of time. There is also a mailing list maintained by GBIF but it has very low traffic in recent years. Slack was mentioned as HipChat has been bought by Slack and ALA will likely move to Slack with paid support for full history. / What about https://www.mattermost.org/ as an open source version of Slack, also what about using the GitHub "discussions" feature ?/
  • Documentation was mentioned as needing more work, as it it is not comprehensive or complete.
  • Marie-Elise talked about the next LA workshop to take place in Paris in April 2019.
  • Donald talked a bit more about the resourcing of the LA workshops, etc., and how the funding model will change in 2019. He asked for feedback on how this can be improved (email Donald).
  • Patricia mentioned there are foundations in Europe that provide funding that the LA community could apply for.
  • Holger Dettki (Sweden) suggested member counties could provide "extra" national contributions to GBIF to help fund the LA workshops, as it was easier to make an increased payments to GBIF than separate funding.
  • Marie suggested 1 person be assigned as a contact for community requests and other tasks. E.g. being person responsible for supporting all the various language translations and keeping them up to date.
  • Lee suggested ALA and GBIF play a "special role/interest" in LA community at the governance level.
  • Donald suggested future components (such as ecological data tools) could be incorporated to broaden the biodiversity data reach of the platform.
  • Holger asked: how do we form this umbrella organisation?
  • Donald responded saying GBIF (?) could provide some roles and instigate actions to help community but still keeping branding separate from GBIF (Nick: not 100% sure about this interpretation of my notes).
  • Donald talked about the Apache Foundation as a model we could follow. He suggested people Google "the apache way" (LMGTFY link) to see video explaining this (taken from GBIC 2 conference).
  • Peggy Newman (ALA) suggested the R community "ROpenSci" could also be a good model.
  • Actions needed to move forward: get tacet approval for developing a governance model; agree to move core code into shared GitHub organisation; agree on roles and rules (Nick: part of governance really); document suggestions and process for obtaining approval.
  • start a mailing list to allow participants to discuss these issues (?)
  • Improve the architectural overview to better explain the components
  • Prabhakar: Do we need separate teams to take responsibility of various components? Its not clear there are sufficient resources to allow this to happen.
  • Patricia: Foundations and Fellowships are available and applying for these requires some role to own this and a commitment over time to make it happen.
  • Prabhakar: Capacity amongst members must be improved (collectively)
  • Roles might include "technical advisors", e.g. Lee for SP, Dave Martin for biocache, etc.